Siri or Skynet? How to separate AI fact from fiction

First, AI is real and here to stay. And it matters. If you care about the world we live in, and how that world is likely to change in the coming years and decades, you should care as much about the trajectory of AI as you might about forthcoming elections or the science of climate breakdown. What happens next in AI, over the coming years and decades, will affect us all. Electricity, computers, the internet, smartphones and social networking have all changed our lives, radically, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, and AI will, too.

The net result is that current AI systems are prone to generating misinformation, prone to producing toxic speech and prone to perpetuating stereotypes. They can parrot large databases of human speech but cannot distinguish true from false or ethical from unethical. Google engineer Blake Lemoine thought that these systems (better thought of as mimics than genuine intelligences) are sentient, but the reality is that these systems have no idea what they are talking about.

Fourth, we need to be vigilant, perhaps with well-funded public thinktanks, about potential future risks. (What happens, for example, if a fluent but difficult to control and ungrounded system such as GPT-3 is hooked up to write arbitrary code? Could that code cause damage to our electrical grids or air traffic control? Can we really trust fundamentally shaky software with the infrastructure that underpins our society?)