Bart Eckott is the lead commentator.
The invention is like toothpaste. Once it’s there, it’s hard to push it back into the tube. This realization makes it a little pointless to invite prominent figures from the tech world to take a break from developing artificial intelligence (AI). It won’t happen. So it is better that we follow a different path to contain the risks of rapid technological progress. way of legal containment.
Because it is now clear that those risks are very real. With AI pioneer Jeffrey Hinton leaving Google, a leading developer has now also joined the chorus of critics. Vision does not help us, but naivety does not help us either. The capabilities of new AI systems like ChatGPT are revolutionary in both the good and the annoying sense of the word. Such systems could make it possible to detect cancers more quickly or to recognize patterns in the search for incurable diseases that remain hidden from the human eye and brain.
The problem is that more potentially malicious apps are equal. So far we have seen only a few innocent attempts at deception. For example, the Republican Party in the United States recently released a video criticizing President Joe Biden with computer-generated imagery. It is just the beginning of a whole new form of propaganda, in which everything becomes possible and it will still be very difficult to control what is real and what is not. A dark future in which fake videos are weaponized to turn groups of people against each other is no longer a fantasy.
The fact that the greatest inventions can have a good side and a bad side is an insight as old as human history. No guns without gunpowder, no tanks without wheels. Banning is not the answer, it is the restriction. It is up to the legislator to set the rules of the game, not the federation of tech giants. For example, the European Parliament has been chewing for some time on a ban on the use of facial recognition in public. great idea. Participants in a running race could use facial recognition to get a selfie of themselves from a crowd of thousands of runners. It might be silly, but what if the same technology could be used to identify and punish participants in a demonstration?
Centuries-old myths and stories warn us against human overconfidence in wanting progress: Prometheus, Faust, Frankenstein, Blade Runner… At the same time, you can also read these stories as moral attempts to keep people young and obedient. This is why another “big story” is better suited as a guideline. When he had to brave the dying cheers of the sirens, Odysseus didn’t turn back with his ship. He tied himself to a mast to prevent himself from getting sucked into his ordeal. It is a good picture of what a strong rule of law can do against the drawbacks and dangers of inevitable change.
