Behind the Artificial Mind

Your guess is as good as mine as to what Geoffrey Hinton is trying to say in this truncated article.  The only thing I could come up with is that Artificial Intelligence in the wrong hands is very dangerous.  He notes the example of Cambridge Analytica using vast data banks to help manipulate elections, which has been well covered, but then that's always been the case.  If you know how to target your audience you can get them to believe almost anything.  So, I really don't see how AI makes a big difference here other than to have a much broader reach.

Nevertheless, Mr. Hinton says Bernie Sanders, the White House and Elon Musk have already reached out to him since departing Google, fearing the worst has yet to come.  Interesting he put Bernie first but then you read down and he claims to be a socialist.  If so, why was he working for Google in the first place?  He had to know that their only interest in AI is how to game the system, which he subsequently laments.

It seems to me that AI isn't the problem so much as it is those who exploit it.  Unfortunately, much of our society is very gullible and will believe almost anything that emanates from their favorite media sources.  To the point they don't trust anything else.  This is what I run into on social media.  Some of my conservative friends claim they are independent minded, but when I see them spreading the same talking points from conservative outlets, often verbatim, I understand that this is just a way to defend their own very dependent thinking.  Any attempt to reach them is pure folly.   

Part of the problem with all these generated memes is you have to really struggle to find the sources and determine if the person the quotes are attributed to really said them. The best I could do was find a 2020 Twitter post attributed to his name.  I'll assume the blue check mark verified this was actually him.  

Today, you can't be so sure about these blue checks as dear Elon has put a price on them and basically anyone can take an identity as long as they pay for it.  End result, dead persons are coming back to life on Tweety Bird.  I can only hope Hinton turns down Elon's request.

Even then the memes will be used to defend both sides of an argument even though Tyson is well known for his liberal views.  This has sadly happened to Orwell, who is often quoted today by conservatives.  Talk about being downright Orwellian!

When you reach a point where you don't know what's real anymore then you are either hallucinating or in deep trouble or both.  The problem has grown immeasurably with the development of social media over the past twenty years.  What started as a way to rate undergraduate female students at Harvard has grown into a mega or should I say meta industry that dominates the media market.  And you wonder why these AI created images all have busty women?  It basically grew out of puerile minds that spent way too much time at the computer.  I'll try to give Mr. Hinton the benefit of the doubt and assume he is above such Manga fantasies.

Facebook is now valued at 600 billion dollars.  Google a whopping $1.3 trillion! Both well beyond the reach of Musk.  He was able to pick up Twitter for a relative bargain basement price of 45 billion, which is still far more than any of the world's leading newspapers.  Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a measly $250 million.  Traditional media is basically operating on fumes, as Musk made manifest when he threatened NPR's attempt to exit Twitter by reassigning its account to another company. Essentially creating a doppelganger that most Twitter users would assume to be real, as the new company would pay for the coveted blue check.  Vengeance is mine, you can hear Elon shout!  While Zuckerberg, Page and Brin have been more silent, they are not shy to use strong arm tactics as well.  After all they have shareholders to answer to.

Ironically, traditional media lost what little leverage it had by becoming dependent on social media to spread its word.  The major newspapers and magazines want to lock you into subscription rates but are falling short, way short.  So they make their main articles available on social media so that persons might be tempted to subscribe.  It doesn't really work that way as social media is still seen as a "free space," although Musk wants to change that now as well.  The best you can hope for is that your articles get enough views that advertisers might be willing to pay you to tag them in your posts and videos.  That's basically how Youtube, which is owned by Google, works.

Sadly, AI is here to stay. We aren't going to put the proverbial jeannie back into the bottle.  One way or the other we have to come to terms with this extraordinary power that will soon be well beyond human comprehension, if it isn't already.  How we do that remains to be seen.