Artificial Intelligence Philosophy and Its Other Huge Issues – A Few Current Views

There is something about AI that gets people to perceive the loftiest concerns imaginable.  Years after it jumped into our consciousness in inaccurate articles about how it aced law school assignments, the depth of its future effects is still highly uncertain. 

We have little trouble identifying the approximate year most forecasts were prepared, whether through drawings, science fiction, or just lists of ideas, as they evolve depending on the technology and priorities of their presents.  How, then, does AI’s future look now?

In “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rings in 2025 with cryptic, concerning tweet about AI’s future” (Fox Business, January 4^th), Andrea Margolis related how the OpenAI founder claimed the technology was “near the singularity, unclear which side.”  Margolis clarified that Altman was saying one of two things, either that “the simulation hypothesis,” or the trendy but automatically baseless idea “that humans exist in a computer simulation,” is correct, or that it is impossible for us to know exactly “where technological singularity,” or “the point at which technology becomes so advanced that it moves beyond the control of mankind, potentially wreaking havoc on human civilization,” begins.  If he was suggesting that AI might cause singularity, we have no reason to think that’s already happened, but next year could conceivably be different. 

Although Ezra Klein’s “’Now Is the Time of Monsters’” (The New York Times, January 19^th) was telling us that “four trends are converging to make life much scarier” and only one was AI development, it was the largest.  The author cited results on a test “designed to compare the fluid intelligence of humans and A.I. systems” improving with OpenAI’s latest model from scoring 5% to 88%, and wondered if we were prepared, or “even really preparing for” “these intelligences.”  A valid question, though not terrifying on the face of it.

Kevin Roose told us, about a then newly released report, that “This A.I. Forecast Predicts Storms Ahead” (The New York Times, April 3^rd).  The Berkeley nonprofit A.I. Futures Project, which “has spent the past year trying to predict what the world will look like over the next few years, as increasingly powerful A.I. systems are developed,” came out with “AI 2027… that describes, in a detailed fictional scenario, what could happen.”  The piece said that “there’s no shortage of speculation about A.I. these days,” with “warring tribes and splinter sects, each one convinced that it knows how the future will unfold.”  The excerpts here read like those from dystopian disaster novels, and all depend not only on exponential AI progress but on its systems busting their bounds, becoming the equivalent of copiers hopping around their offices and then out of them like giant metal frogs to make images of everything they can find. 

Patrick Kulp described a more sober study on the same general topic in “AI researchers are split on how AI will impact society” (Emerging Tech Brew, April 16^th).  This one, from University College London, asked “more than 4,200 AI researchers” in the summer of 2024 what they thought.  Fifty-four percent “said AI has more benefits than risks, 33% said benefits and risks are roughly equal and 9% said risks outnumber benefits.”  Just over half maintained that “AI research will lead to artificial general intelligence,” and while 29% “were all for pushing its development,” 40% “said AI shouldn’t be developed as quickly as possible.”  As well, “there is more uncertainty among the researchers who are closest to the technology.”  An updated version of this survey could precipitate responses closer to the Berkeley ones, but I don’t think the difference would be massive.

Back to Kevin Roose and the Times, we were asked “If A.I. Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights?” (April 24^th).  A deep idea, but still a novel one, and, with what we know about the workings of consciousness fitting into a thimble, one for the future or maybe never.  Until that changes, we can wait on this issue.  And we should not hold our breath.  Likewise, if we can keep AI tools away from the rest of the world, we won’t have anything to fear.  Let us hope, on huge AI worries, that that becomes the final word.