‘I don’t worry about a robot takeover’: AI expert Michael Wooldridge on big tech’s real dangers (and occasional blessings)
Although I'm not big on game theory, the theorist behind it is interviewed in this piece from The Guardian. His thoughts on AI.
Some of it is absolutely frightening.
“The limits are the computer power and the data that you’re able to throw at it. And data is now a real constraint.” The whole of Wikipedia made up just 3% of GPT-3’s training data, he says. “Where do you get 10 times more data from next time around?” Data is becoming a valuable resource for that reason, and some organisations possess a potential trove of it. “The NHS is sitting on a huge amount of data about human beings. That’s the most valuable kind of data imaginable.” Private corporations would pay dearly for it, he says, “but I suspect that whoever signed off on such a deal would live to regret it”. He imagines a dystopian future scenario where “you’re only able to have access to the NHS if you agree to be wired up to wearable tech that monitors you on a regular basis … I think we are very quickly going to a world where the next generation of online influencers basically agree to have all of their life experiences, everything they say and do and see, harvested to provide data for AI.”
From an academic standpoint, Wooldridge resents the way Silicon Valley has come to dominate the AI field, both in terms of resources (“GPT-3 required 20,000-odd AI supercomputers to train; there are probably a couple of hundred in the whole of the University of Oxford”) and the public discourse. “We have seen the narrative stolen by Silicon Valley, which is promoting a version of AI [profit-driven, job-replacing and almost entirely focused on large language models] that certainly me and an awful lot of my colleagues have no interest in promoting or building,” he says. “It’s kind of depressing, as somebody who’s spent their career trying to build AI to make a better world and to improve people’s lives.”
If he could, though, he would slow the pace of AI development, “just so that we have more time to understand what’s going on”. It is, he points out, a classic “prisoner’s dilemma”, one of the foundational parables of game theory.
My reservations with game theory is--it seems to me--that the answer to most of the 'dilemmas' are to be found in the age old truism: The truth will set you free.
