As I’ve discussed previously in this series, social media has already knocked a pillar out from under our democratic institutions by making it exceptionally easy for people with extreme views to connect and coordinate.
Now, here comes generative artificial intelligence, a tool that will help bad actors further accelerate the spread of misinformation.
A healthy democracy could govern this new technology and put it to good use in countless ways. It would also develop defenses against those who put it to adversarial use. And it would look ahead to probable economic transformation and begin to lay out plans to navigate what will be a rapid and startling set of transitions. But is our democracy ready to address these governance challenges?
I’m worried about the answer to that, which is why I joined a long list of technologists, academics and even controversial visionaries such as Elon Musk in signing an open letter calling for a pause for at least six months of “the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
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We used to worry about the impacts of AI on truck drivers; now it’s also the effects on lawyers, coders and anyone who depends on intellectual property for their livelihood. This advance will increase productivity but also supercharge dislocation.
