Gary Marcus

🎺 I am tired of the cosplay and am going to blunt. 🎺 Most AI doesn’t threaten to cause extinction, or even mass cybercrime. The main kind of AI we need to worry about is general purpose AI agents that are hooked up to the internet. Most of them are unreliable, unable to systematically follow instructions. Coupled with internet access they can hack credentials and websites; given time they can probably do a lot worse. They are not too smart; they are too dumb (in a very specific way, viz in the consistent following of instructions). If we temporarily recall them, as the unsafe product that they are — and enforceably forbid their use until they can be shown to be safe — pretty much all the “rogue AI” stuff people are worrying about goes away. It’s that simple. We don’t (yet) need slowdowns. And we certainly don’t need to panic. We just need to take an unsafe product off the market.