Artificial Intelligence Has Certainly Become A Global Focus This Last Year!

This popped up a few days ago as emblematic of the trend:

Summit warns about dangers of artificial intelligence influence

By Jacquelin Magnay

5:41PM November 2, 2023

Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic has warned artificial intelligence-generated misinformation is “the big thing” that could influence the way people make future decisions, including at elections.

He said governments had adopted a “comfortable, helpful helplessness” when it comes to technology because it was previously “all too hard”.

But he warned: “I think there’s a dawning realisation on governments, you can’t have that (attitude), you need to shake that off.”

US Vice-President Kamala Harris, speaking separately at the US embassy in London, warned AI has the potential to cause profound harm.

“From AI-enabled cyber attacks at a scale beyond anything we have seen before to AI-formulated bioweapons that could endanger the lives of millions of people. These threats are often referred to as the ‘existential threats of AI’ because of course they could endanger the very existence of humanity.

“These threats without question are profound and they demand global action. But let us be clear, there are additional threats that also demand our action.”

She said the US situation concerning voluntary commitments with technology companies were an “initial step’’, saying there will be more to come “because as history has shown in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritise profit over the wellbeing of their customers”.

Mr Husic, on the sidelines of the British-organised two-day AI summit at Bletchley Park, England, attended by governments and tech titans including Elon Musk, said the application of generative AI and language models “is not so much ‘will the robots take over?’ but ‘will AI-generated disinformation do that?’”

He said disinformation would guide the way people make decisions, not just governments, and impact on the broader public reaction to things that might influence the way governments or businesses respond.

He said Australia was looking to the AI policy models proposed by others, such as the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, because going one-out was too difficult.

On Wednesday, the summit issued the Bletchley declaration, signed by 28 countries,which recognised that there was potential for “serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models”.

The declaration, signed by Australia, said: “Substantial risks may arise from potential intentional misuse or unintended issues of control relating to alignment with human intent. These issues are in part because those capabilities are not fully understood and are therefore hard to predict. We are especially concerned by such risks in domains such as cybersecurity and biotechnology, as well as where frontier AI systems may amplify risks such as disinformation.”

Musk: ‘Hope for the best but prepare for the worst’ with AI

More here:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/summit-warns-about-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-influence/news-story/f1898a89cef5d4c55b35d80603fbe65c

I think this is very important stuff but that it is important to preserve perspective as we navigate a very interesting near future,

My perspective is that much of the work in AI is really fascinating and potentially very impactful but that right now we have a world grappling with a number of equally complex issues cantered around poverty, war, mistrust and hate etc. that we need to navigate and that having the necessary bandwidth to handle it all is a rather daunting ask!

It seems at present we are just managing to ‘walk and chew gum’, as they say, but I wonder just how much energy we need to allocate to the current crop of apparently existential threats which desire our attention to keep the balls safely in the air! More than we have I suspect,,,,

AI has the potential to solve many problems and we need to be sure we direct it onto the important biggies as best we can!

As I, and others, often say ‘I am just a very old man on many drugs’ but I hope I can last long enough to see at least the outline of where this coming revolution is leading because matter it really does IMVHO and I am sure it will be very interesting indeed!

David.