do we need to develop ais as quickly as possible because our time is running out

By Dr. James Ottavio Castagnera, Esq.1

If he’s right, engineer Blake Lemoine will go down in history as the first human being to converse with a sentient A.I. On June 11th the Washington Post broke the story that Lemoine claims to have carried on a conversation with LaMDA, Google’s system for building chatbots.2

Lemoine told the Post, “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics.” Lemoine, who works (worked?) for Google’s “Responsible AI” unit, released conversation transcripts in support of his claim, and promptly was suspended.

Lemoine, who may be something of a whistleblower, also made an interesting point: “I think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.”

I agree with him that this technology is already amazing. I disagree that it’s going to benefit everyone. On the contrary, I believe it will make many millions of people redundant. Consider the gig workers who labor for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and all the other Internet-based service companies. These folks might have held well-paid manufacturing jobs, except that what remains of manufacturing in America is performed increasingly by robots. And so they struggle in the courts and via labor organizing to win wages and benefits comparable to what their unionized moms and dads made in the auto plants and steel mills of America’s golden age.

Instead of better jobs, what these gig workers are likely to get is what the Brits call “redundancy notices.” Walking down a street in Austin (TX) earlier this year, I found myself being followed by a silver box about the size of a dorm-room frig. The box was being shadowed by two lads on bikes who informed me their firm was testing a food-delivery bot. Where will the gig workers go when all the Ubers are self-driving and DoorDash switches to bots?

It gets worse. Lawyers like me tend to feel smug. Shakespeare may have wanted to kill us all. But we’re sure modern America can’t do without a few million of us. Consequently, like Dr. Frankenstein, we are creating the monster that will eventually, but inevitably, turn on us. Law firms already use A.I. for due diligence, legal research, and billing. Experts confidently predict that A.I. will replace paralegals within this current decade. One well-known litigator,Tom Girardi (the inspiration for the lawyer in “Erin Brockovitch”) told Forbes, “It may even be considered legal malpractice not to use AI one day.”3 How large a leap is it from there to unbiased, dispassionate judges and consummately competent attorneys?

Homo sapiens assumes itself to be the pinnacle of evolution on earth. I recently read a claim on Linked In that we are destined to be “the voice of the universe.” What incredible hubris! Again, Mary Shelley’s novel comes to mind. This leads me to another aging novel, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). In his first book, Vonnegut envisioned a future in which most folks did busy work on road crews, while a few engineers and managers ran the robots which did all the meaningful work. This prescient yarn prefigures the Uniform Basic Income.

But Vonnegut couldn’t see at a distance of 70 years that even his engineers and Ph.D.s might one day be redundant. And, if A.I.s, perhaps under the control of a few oligarchs, are able to do every imaginable task, why keep seven or eight billion of us around at all? Some anthropologists believe that 40,000 years ago Cro-Magnons ate Neanderthals.4 One might find the parallel compelling

And, if we are painfully honest with ourselves, might it not be for the best? Mother Nature may think so. We’ve over-populated and trashed the planet. Now she’s turned on us… and much sooner than our scientists and meteorologists predicted. We thought we had at least a few more decades to reverse climate change. Increasingly frequent severe-weather events suggest that the future is now. And, then, there are the megalomaniacs like Putin who just might blow us all up before Mother Nature can consummate her revenge.

Perhaps what we really need to do is accelerate the creation of our descendants --- our

successors --- while we still can.

Webinar link https://assentglobal.us/webinar/1929/The-Four-Pillars-of-Organizational-Resilience--Data-Privacy,-Compliance,--Cybersecurity,-and-Enterprise-Risk-Management