09/11/2023
The Handover by David Runciman review - Is the future beyond our hands? chatgpt
ChatGPT I visited the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford to speak with the director, a Swede-born philosophy professor
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I visited the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford to speak with the director, a Swede-born philosophy professor,
Looking back on the experience, I can recall three specific details. One was that when I arrived, a bed was being brought to the institution, reinforcing the notion that anxiety over the looming catastrophe was a 24-hour job.
The second reason was that the bacteria-phobic Bostrom had been the first to prefer handshakes, not fists (the form of the future too soon). Thirdly, his assertion that AI could pose an even more significant threat to the end of the human race than, for instance, climate change pandemics or nuclear war.
At first, the concept was to be awash with strange ideas of the science-fiction genre. In the time since the book’s publication, it could have been better. Bostrom’s book presented various scenarios in which our destiny could be determined through the machines we create.
The most popular method was that of an AI system that makes mysterious “nano factories producing target-seeking mosquito-like robots [which] might then burgeon forth simultaneously from every square meter of the globe” to overtake us. Another more plausible concept was the idea of artificial intelligence “hijacking political processes, subtly manipulating financial markets, biasing information flows” to cause our horror and, eventually, destruction.
These checks and balances that we have applied to government and companies should be used for artificial intelligence. ChatGPT
David Runciman’s more sane book analyzes the initial phase of the latter argument. The Cambridge political scientist and, until last year, the ever-inspiring host of the fantastic podcast, the Talking Politics Podcast, isn’t a believer in the prophecy of the world’s end. The closest he could get to this was in a sequence of exclamation marks with irony, which reverberated the chapter headings of his book of the same name in 2018, What Happens When Democracy Ends.
This book builds on the arguments in this chapter, particularly Runciman’s assertion that the threats “we the people” face from AI threats to our freedom and autonomy as citizens, although urgent, aren’t as revolutionary as we believe. He believes the plan for dealing with these issues was developed over decades by the corresponding threats from corporate and state power.
This “singularity” chatbot
That tech evangelists speak about – the possible synergy between man and machine could be known as the “second singularity,” Runciman claims convincingly.
