Cool Worlds Lab has some great video on YouTube worth watching. One of latest related to artificial intelligence (AI), titled “AI Has Poisoned Everything?” As with most of the videos on the site, it poses a number of questions. In this case, the questions are very troubling.
I am used to the videos asking questions such as Is there life elsewhere in the universe? and When will our time in the universe end?, but the question posed in this video is much more immediate. It asked Can we count on our eyes and understanding of the world as AI takes over? It is a scary question that has no answer yet, and the efforts so far in Washington DC to understand AI seem puny compared to the potential threat.
But don’t stop with the video. The Cool Worlds podcast has more on AI. This week’s podcast, “Hugging Face Hack, AI Meltdowns, Poisoning AI,” involves a discussion between Professor David Kipping and Hal Triedman, a PhD student at Cornell Tech. Triedman is studying the role of AI agents, which are grabbing all of the attention these days as they hack their way through our economy.
None of this is uplifting, but it is important and worth understanding. We are being pushed into this new world, so we need to be ready for what is to come. Even if half of what is being said is an exaggeration, the remaining half is more than enough to threaten everything we have built as a civilization to date.
Like nuclear weapons, we cannot unlearn what we now know. Unlike nuclear weapons, AI may be able to think and act on its own before we find a way to put any controls around it.
