AI Could Replace Your Job, But That’s Not the Real Risk | Software Sundays | Software Sundays #44

For the news this week, I wanted to talk about some of these stories that i've heard about the ai researcher from anthropic basically giving a warning to the world that these labs are building ai that could kill us and that's really been the story that everyone is focusing on when they heard or when they saw this guy's tweet and it It's understandable, right? In the last couple of weeks, both OpenAI and Anthropic have both had their own incidents involving AI models that were behaving and doing things that they were not supposed to be doing.

And that's understandable.

We already know that there is a lack of openness inside of these models, right? Like the leading models, are being developed by these closed private companies.

And those private companies don't have many regulations that they have to comply with yet.

Now, there are some regulations that are coming out and slowly being implemented.

But for the most part, a lot of this development is happening in a void, in a vacuum, where it's really just the people leading the effort saying when to accelerate and when to slow down.

So it makes sense to at least consider the risks that AI and the continued development of AI can actually bring.

But I don't believe it's worth the fear that everyone is kind of giving to it right now.

Because if we think about AI like any other technology, The technology is just a tool that people can use to accelerate whatever their values are or to make their vision or make the world into their vision with the tools available to them.

Now, if we're saying that AI is another tool, and we're considering that it can be risky to the world and like humanity as a whole, then we have to ask ourselves what about AI and who have we given AI to that is going to make it more destructive than beneficial to everyone, right? Because we're basically saying that like that 10% chance of everything going to like end of times because ai has been unleashed we have to think about not only who developed the ai models but who is deploying the model into the world because it's not always going to be the labs themselves right even today some of the best models are coming out of the labs but the gap between the open source models and the frontier models from these labs has been closing over time.

So the intelligence is going to be out there.

The tools are going to exist.

Now the question is going to be, what are we doing with the tools that we have available? And this is probably always a question that's worth asking and answering for yourself and for your community.

So something that really would encourage everyone to think about and not focus so much in the fear mongering that is being done and kind of led in the media because that's not going to become beneficial, right? If we're saying, you know, if we're thinking too much about the worst things that have happened, we start losing sight of the best things that could happen.

The changes that would be beneficial that could actually improve the world and how we work overall.

And then Even thinking about the AI risks, it presents a problem that technologists who understand the technology and who actually care about solving problems for people can actually get an opportunity from.

Because when we're thinking about safety and deploying a system safely, that means you have to deploy it under the responsibility of a responsible operator.

And these operators are going to need to be people that understand the technology, that aren't afraid of the technology, people that understand how to build with the technology, people that understand what questions to ask, what problems to give fully to AI, and which problems that require a human touch.

That taste and that perception it's really a skill, right? So you can grow it over time and it's something that's worth growing now, but you won't be able to grow it if you're focused on the negative aspects of this technology and the transformation that it's bringing.

And trust me, yes, the risk is out there.

People are talking about it and maybe a few of these companies have kind of volunteered to slow down and consider the impact of, what it is that they're building, but I promise you the development will not stop.

There has been billions put into AI, and not even just AI on its own, but into the infrastructure that's going to power another wave of AI.

We haven't even gotten to that next form of it yet, but that infrastructure is being invested into right now.

And they're not investing into it for no reason.

They're not investing into it just to stop here.