We all want the AI that creeps into our lives to be ‘safe’. We use that word a lot. But what exactly does it mean, in this context? What does ‘safe’ AI look like? From a risk management standpoint, it’s informative to answer the question of ‘safe’ AI by starting with what un-safe AI looks like. That’s discouragingly easy to do, even this early on. Let’s see how close this list comes. AI that isn’t aligned with human well-being is unsafe AI. If an AI’s goals conflict with hu

The great fear of AI – voiced by millions, and in particular the two youngest generations – is that AI is here to replace us. That’s not an unreasonable fear, in a social media climate where so many (including more than a few actual industry players) are hell-bent on doomposting exactly that message, day in and out. It’s certainly true that there’s a vast population of capitalists out there who would be quite pleased to cut their workforces by 90% or more. Well, they’re capit

We’ve been well-prepped for maleficent AI by our movies, TV and books for decades now (HAL 9000, Skynet, the Cylons), but we’ve seen enough of the real thing to understand that evil AI in the here-and-now is, well, hovering in the wings. A real thing. A thing to take seriously. We can easily see what that can mean, and it now becomes our task to decide what we can do about it. The first step is figuring out what “good” and “evil” are, in AI terms, and what options we have in

The AI doomscroll is now a 24/7 thing, it looks like. Open any social media channel, day or night, and bam! AI is 1) taking all our jobs, 2) smothering all human creativity, or 3) sacrificing us by the millions to scarf up water for new data centers. And in the midst of all this teeth-gnashing we get word of an experiment by Emergence AI, a US startup that undertook to test several leading AI models to see how well they would do if put in charge of us all. In this experiment,

The state of AI in the US is precarious; it looms dark over the economy, as the forecast of 300 million jobs vanishing in 10 years enters...

My youngest daughter is a fine arts major, deeply immersed in her training to become an animator. She is incensed at the intrusion of AI...

Most reasonable people will agree that AI, unregulated (as it currently is), is a very dangerous thing. The question becomes, how is AI...

Among the subtler threats of AI is its potential to diminish what it means to be human. Already, AI is able to present itself in such...

Among those putting forth predictions of the AI future is the Pew Research Center, which published a June 2023 report summarizing the ...

The potential for a merger between humanity and AI is so great that its supporters have created a new paradigm for it in the schema of...

One of the great thought experiments of the modern age cuts right to the heart of the AI discourse: can machines ever think like humans?...

Let's begin with a reiteration of a point made prominently in this book’s predecessor: that point being, This time it’s different. That’s...

It was 1952, and the idea of the modern digital computer was only a few years old – and unknown to the general public. But a newly-minted...

Above, we noted the prediction that all human labor – every job humans currently do – will be taken over by AI in the next 12 decades....

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the potential pitfalls presented by the rapid rise of AI, and justly so: AI is the...

Faced with the possibility of malevolent AI that does us harm – or AI that freely complies when humans use it to harm other humans – what...

One place where AI is very likely to punch, and punch hard, is in the domain of social media, which has done plenty of damage to society...

It is not overstating to say that humanity is at a crossroads. It has been long anticipated, and goes by several names: the Fourth...

The general truth that “anything a human being can do, AI can do better” is in the water supply, and of course that isn’t quite true....

Peter Frase offers a variation on Robert Costanza’s AI outcomes matrix in his book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. It bears a lot of...