I love how Karen Hao uses the word transportation as an analogy for pointing out how “AI” is an elusive word. It makes me think of how some people appear to be arguing that SUV’s are great because bicycles exist.
“AI is such an interesting word because it’s sort of like the word transportation in that you have bicycles, you have gas guzzling trucks, you have rocket ships. They're all forms of transportation, but they all serve different purposes and they have different cost-benefit trade-offs."
"And to me, the quest to artificial general intelligence has the worst trade-offs because you are trying to build fundamentally an Everything-machine, but ultimately it can't actually do all of the things."
"So not only do you confuse the public about what you can actually do with these technologies, which leads to harm because then people start asking it for things like medical information and instead getting medical misinformation back, but also it requires all of these things that I described: the colossal resource consumption [and] the colossal labor exploitation."
Watch the clip from PBS News Hour, then buy and read Karen’s important new book “Empire of AI”. I’ve just lined it up in my Kobo Reader.