Because it is not the AI but the letter from Musk & Co that must scare us
Neither forbid, nor suspend, nor condemn: the only possible alternative to being afraid is to learn to think. Paola Liberace's comment
"Fear made the gods." If Tito Lucrezio Caro had lived today, perhaps he would have written the same sentence about artificial intelligence. The fear that seizes us when confronted with such complex systems is perhaps comparable only to that portrayed by the Latin poet, who captured the first men in the face of the shocking force of natural phenomena. With one fundamental difference: while natural phenomena are not originated by man, the so-called "artificial intelligences" are in all respects. And to say so, you don't need to be technology experts, programmers, IT engineers, digital gurus or web pioneers (if anything, this figure increases the responsibility of those who, knowing the subject and its delicacy, choose to address it with pseudo-prophetic proclamations use of journalistic headline).
To confer any reliability to the alarms on AI is not the fact that people who fall into the aforementioned categories, or similar, launch it: it is only the intrinsic solidity of the aforementioned alarms. A solidity which – to paraphrase the motto of an old teacher of theoretical philosophy – is not metaphysics; it is not moral; it's logical. Logic, like the elementary distinction between subject and object: once we understand that we are talking about the second, it becomes easier to understand why it makes no sense to attribute the properties of the first to it.
If we are talking about objects, and not about "non-human minds (sic!)", it makes no sense to fear that they can "outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us". If we are talking about objects, it is clear that disinformation does not originate from them, but from the stubbornness or ignorance of the subjects. If we are talking about objects, however powerful, it is clear that it is not they who are dangerous, but the use that the subjects make of them – always assuming that it has been made clear to them that they are dealing with objects to be used, and in what way to do it. If all this is true, it is not the objects, but the subjects that we should fear: and therefore we don't need less technology, but more expertise – the same one that has revealed, over the centuries, the true nature of lightning transformed into gods by fear of the first men. With the aggravating circumstance that in this case the nature is already known, above all to those who have launched the heartfelt appeals to suspend even temporarily the developments.
In short, if all this is true, the problem is not the golden calf, but whoever carved it and made an idol of it, pointing it out as a god to be revered in collective fear. And every god, as we know, has his priests, the only ones entitled to mediate his relationship with the faithful. Fostering fear — rather than taking responsibility for sharpening thinking, spreading knowledge, and curating education — is a great way to maintain this exclusivity. Without adequate categories to define the entities and their attributions, we can only be electrocuted by the lightning that follows one another in a sky as wonderful as it is dark, believing those who assure us that they are gods and propose themselves as a priest to appease their wrath. Neither forbid, nor suspend, nor condemn: the only possible alternative to being afraid is to learn to think.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/perche-non-e-lai-ma-la-lettera-di-musk-co-che-deve-farci-paura/ on Sat, 01 Apr 2023 05:10:26 +0000.