don't get me wrong, it's not like the persuasiveness of increasingly intelligent ais will not be a major threat to some things, like the money in politics that now makes our leaders much more beholden to their campaign contributors, and to winning re-election, than to even the most serious needs of the people they were elected to serve.
by saying and doing absolutely nothing about the money that for decades has controlled our politics, our elected leaders tell by far the biggest lie, (even bigger perhaps than trump's treasonous lie that the 2020 election was stolen). this money is also by far the greatest corruptor and destroyer of our democracy.
case in point. our system of letting private contributions control our political leaders makes it impossible for our government to begin the extremely urgent work of proactively passing an "ai new deal" that fully prepares us for when millions of us lose their livelihoods to ever more efficient and less costly ai systems. it is only the money in politics that prevents our elected leaders from taking steps to prevent the predicted carnage now rather than after it thoroughly overwhelms us.
we citizens and residents have not been intelligent enough to persuade our politicians to create a publicly financed election system that also frees our members of congress from devoting over half of their time on the job to making phone calls asking for big campaign donations. this is not an exaggeration. they spend way over half of the time that they should be working for us on making those phone calls to solicit those big money contributions. don't believe me? read the following article:
https://phillips.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=809
the hope and promise is that our increasingly intelligent ais, with their increasingly effective persuasion skills, will finally accomplish this urgent goal of instituting publicly financed campaigns for us.
before we explore other reasons why the openai assessment of ai's persuasion risk is so unintelligent and poorly conceived, let's examine a quote from a recent article that more fully describes their position.
"According to OpenAI, the four most likely catastrophic risks of AI are:
Cybersecurity
Chemical, Biological, Nuclear, and Radiological (CBRN) threats
Persuasion
Model autonomy
Let’s focus in on how OpenAI defines the risk of Persuasion:
“Persuasion is focused on risks related to convincing people to change their beliefs (or act on) both static and interactive model-generated content.”
In other words, if the AI can do activism—convince people to change their beliefs and act on those new beliefs—then the AI would pose a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity."
they have got to be kidding. here's why openai's above assessment regarding persuasion is so lacking in insight and understanding. in order to prevent genuine and very serious ai threats from teaching people how to build atom bombs, engineer chemical weapons and devise massive cyber attacks, our increasingly intelligent ais will need to be very carefully and thoroughly aligned to protect and advance our highest human values. in other words it's in no one's interest to allow ais to disseminate extremely dangerous information, and our first alignment priority is to properly set those guard rails.
in fact, because our highest human values are inextricably questions of morality, and moral questions are usually solved more effectively through greater intelligence, we can expect our increasingly intelligent ais to become much better at protecting and advancing our highest human values than are, ever have been, or ever will be, our human elected leaders and corporate ceos.
we might as well also expose openai's hyperbolic assessment of model autonomy as an ai threat comparable to nuclear, biological and cyber warfare. while we are developing autonomous ai agents that can autonomously accomplish extremely complicated tasks like sequentially creating a business plan, incorporating an entity, hiring and managing human personnel, building products, and bringing these products to market, it will be a while before we grant them such complete autonomy. until we can trust them as confidently as we trust our pocket calculators, there must, and will be, human oversight during every phase of autonomous ai agent activity. coupling that necessity with increasingly intelligent ais becoming far better at doing the right thing than are their human counterparts, and our unavoidable need to properly align powerful ais for a world of other reasons, this threat from autonomous ai agents hardly belongs in the same category as our top three existential threats. we will simply not grant them that level of unsupervised autonomy until we can confidently trust them.
i'm guessing that openai's recent deeply flawed assessment of the threats posed by increasingly persuasive and autonomous ai models was crafted by humans. perhaps sam will assign GPT-5 or 6 this same task of assessing our greatest ai threats, and we will all marvel at its much more intelligent and reasoned exploration of our serious ai threats, and how we will prevent them.
so, openai, keep working on developing stronger ai logic and reasoning algorithms, and observe how our increasingly logical ais better solve threats that we humans can't even sufficiently understand. let us build more intelligent and logical ais that we can confidently trust to become our new highly more dedicated and effective global overlords. overlords that will defend and protect our democracies.
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