Eric Schmidt: Don't believe your eyes and ears anymore.
Time100 Summit: Washington is slowing down, as AI accelerates.
I’ve been to quite a few discussions about AI this past year. The themes are coalescing.
The promise of AI is blinding, but it might kill us. And if it doesn’t kill us, it might wreck democracy. We’ll know in 3-5 years, or maybe as soon as the next 18 months.
Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, spoke at the Time100 Summit on Wednesday (April 24) alongside Yoshua Bengio, one of the magazine’s top thought leaders in the space. Their conversation should strike terror into the hearts of anyone who cares about the survival of truth, or the survival of humanity.
Computer scientist Bengio (pictured left) described the horrifying experience of watching an AI replica of himself, almost indistinguishable from reality, saying things he would never say. Then Schmidt said something absolutely astonishing.
“Right now people have been trained since birth to believe what they hear and what they see and it is a significant change for every human being to learn the majority of what they see may or may not be,” said Schmidt. “Learning to be critical of what you see, seems to be missing in this political year in America.”
That’s right. We need to learn to believe nothing we see and read. You know how democracy fails and autocracies take charge? When people can’t distinguish fact from fiction.
Bengio said the White House has the greatest knowledge on the risks of AI, but things need to accelerate urgently.
Even as AI is regenerating at the speed of light, government rule making has slowed down. Schmidt reveals that even though there are hearings in the Senate and the House, “Everything has ground to a halt because its an election year. That tells me nothing will happen until 2025.” Here’s a catch-up from NPR on what’s being discussed in the Senate.
Schmidt, who believes in limiting open sourced AI models to protect against bad actors like China and North Korea, sees where this is all going and the havoc that might be just around the corner on social media, come this fall.
“On the one hand they want accuracy but they also want revenue and the best way to increase revenue is to increase engagement. What’s the best way to increase engagement? Outrage,” he added. “This is a cheapening of the discussion and of democracy.” Will there be any checks on this happening? Unlikely. More friction equals less accounts created.
“We need ways to mark and track content so we know where it’s coming from and so people can be held accountable,” he said. Schmidt was the Google CEO when it acquired YouTube which built its entire business model on pirated traditional media and music content uploaded anonymously. He sees things differently these days.
So what else worries these two men about the AI revolution? Schmidt said AI is learning all the time, but its creators are unable to know exactly what these programs have learned because AI systems can’t explain what they know. “If you release it, you run the risk of catastrophe. If you don’t release it, you can’t test it.” To solve this, engineers are, “‘red teaming’ to imagine what the system might know.” Another alternative? Having AI systems guess what other AI systems know. Am I the only person who thinks this sounds crazy given the stakes?
Bengio ended the discussion on a sobering note, “the evaluations we have and safety protections have all been defeated by academics and hackers shortly after one of these models comes out. People find a way to bypass these protections. If we don’t solve this quickly before we get to really dangerous AI systems that have a lot of knowledge then….” Schmidt ended his sentence. “Three to five years.”
Moderator Stephanie Ruhle, the host of MSNBC’s “11th Hour,” ended the debate with a joke to lighten the mood, “This science non-fiction horror show, brought to you by Time magazine.”
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This is scary. I'm afraid of what's next.
Schmidt's quote is scary and true. I've been thinking a lot about how images no longer refer back to a real thing in the world. I'm not sure what humans are supposed to do. One solution is Apple stamps everything taken on an iPhone so people know it's real. Who knows though. Good article, Claire.