SoftwareAIDell founder says calm down about SHODAN-style sentient AI because ‘you remember the ozone layer and all’ and we fixed thatWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
SoftwareAIDell founder says calm down about SHODAN-style sentient AI because ‘you remember the ozone layer and all’ and we fixed thatWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Irrational Games)
We live in an era of AI hype and everyone has a take. But while most of us are a bit concerned about what the rise of ultra-predictive-text means for human creativity and criticism, a few Silicon Valley types are worrying themselves about Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which is basically a serious-sounding term for self-teaching AI with sentience and, potentially, an unslakeable lust for human blood. Or something of the sort.
That worrying, continues Dell, lets humanity “create counter actions” to prevent those apocalyptic scenarios from playing out before they happen. “You remember the ozone layer and all,” said Dell to Bernstein’s Tony Sacconaghi, “there are all sorts of things that were going to happen. They didn’t happen because humans took countermeasures.”
Dell (the man) went on to say that Dell’s (the company) AI business was booming. “Customer demand nearly doubled quarter-on-quarter for us and the AI optimized backlog roughly doubled to about $1.6 billion at the end of our third quarter,” beamed Dell (the man again), which—and I write this as someone for whom ‘literally GLaDOS’ ranks low on the list of fear priorities—does seem like the kind of thing a tech CEO would say in the prologue to a film about AI killing everyone.
Regardless, Dell reckons you shouldn’t be worried about the robot uprising any time soon, because humans are just that good at recognising and heading off problems before they occur. Except for that climate change thing and thenanoplastics in our blood, I guess. Oh, and the fact that we didn’t start fixing the ozone layer until there was already a gaping hole in it (thatwon’t be fixed until 2040, or 2066 if you happen to live in the Antarctic). If you’ll permit me a bit of editorialising, which I guess I’ve already been doing, that feels like reaching the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.
After all, I’ve already reached the point where I append most of my Google searches with “Reddit” to make sure I’m actually getting human input on whatever problem I’m facing. And that’s a much trickier problem with much more profit-threatening solutions than is the bogeyman of HAL 9000.
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