Elon Musk calls artificial intelligence “a supersonic tsunami headed toward humanity.” The CEO of Anthropic says we have about five years until half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs will be wiped out. Microsoft’s head of AI believes it will happen sooner than that.
The hype around artificial intelligence (AI) is so thick and constant that people are fatigued by it. Unfortunately, though, that fatigue will allow bad actors to dominate the race to AI dominance, which would be a very bad thing. More than the quick answers AI can give us now, who controls the inputs it will use to provide those answers matters far more. That important question is the subject of a brand-new book, who speaks with host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The Drill Down.
“I didn’t want to write this book,” author Wynton Hall tells Eggers. “I felt I had to.”
“I saw those pieces on the chessboard. And when you couple that with what they’re about to do with AI and the political weaponization of it, I realized we have to get people ready for this. It’s coming very, very quickly.”
Hall’s new book, Code Red: The Left the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, deeply explores the people and pressures behind the AI revolution. Hall is the director of social media for Breitbart News and also a distinguished fellow of the Government Accountability Institute, which produced research for the project.
Eggers recalls the anxiety surrounding the gathering of personal information by Google and other Big Tech players that they questioned in a 2016 documentary film called The Creepy Line.
“One of the big takeaways from that [film] is there’s always a gap between when a new technology is introduced and how we decide how to regulate it as a society. The car is a classic example. Cars came around in the 1910s, but we don’t use the word ‘seatbelt’ for another 50-plus years,” he says.
“How good are we doing at this so far? Do we have the right voices in the right rooms?” he asks.
“Over the next two years, $5 trillion of investor cash will go into the AI space,” Hall replies. “There are hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying money going on right now, trying to either support or combat regulatory functions.”
“The reality, though, is that the average person has to understand: how is this going to affect my child’s education? How is this going to affect my job? How is this going to affect our values in terms of human relationships and the rise of AI girlfriends? I have a whole chapter on that.”
Hall’s book is full of insightful chapters on how AI will affect every aspect of your life, including how it will affect the existence of many jobs now done by human beings.
“The future in an AI world is not about teaching your child to find a job but how to create a job. That means teaching entrepreneurship,” Hall explains. “Once they find their passion, if they have that entrepreneurial base of knowledge, they will be able to create a job in whatever calling they feel led to.”
The challenge to people, he says, is to maintain the integrity of your own mind and ability to think at a time when an algorithm can do the work for you.
“One of the big pitfalls we’ve got to watch out for is what’s known as ‘cognitive offloading,’ the erosion of critical thinking skills,” Hall says. “So, if your child does not have the trivium (a classical educational model consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric) as the basis of their education, they’re going to be very susceptible to plagiarism.”
The book spends a great deal of time explaining the stakes of the AI “race” between the U.S. and China, which is of critical importance.
“None of us want to live in a world built on Chinese AI rails,” Hall says. “This is a techno-authoritarian surveillance state. People will say that our privacy gets breached all the time… Surveillance capitalism is real, and there’s a real concern over data privacy.”
“But when you’re talking about using facial recognition for genocide against the Uyghurs by the CCP, when you’re talking about being able to surveil with a drone with facial recognition technology to find a dissident on the ground and either imprison or eliminate them, that is a little different than American usage.”
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