Beyond the hype

Tech CEOs of big companies and other famous personalities do not seem shy to proclaim the disruptive nature of AI. Here is short, incomplete selection

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google:

> "AI could be more profound than fire or electricity."

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and other companies:

> "AI will be the best or worst thing ever for humanity."

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI:

> "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies."

Bill Gates, Co-founder of Microsoft and Philanthropist

> "The First technology that has no limit"

It seems difficult to counter the weight of the narratives that regularly make it to the headlines. Undoubtedly, spaces previously only left to science fiction authors are being filled by others.

But meanwhile, in the real world, the public discourse seems not to be focused on more mundane and ordinary questions that are the ones that actually matter.

Building reliable and safe software was always important. It is unprecedented that established tech-cooperations release software products that can cause outputs which are harmful, discriminatory, addictive and in parts simply quite awful in such a quality as with chatbots. Tech-companies are actually still liable and responsible for their software products. In the same way that a malfunctioning toaster cannot be blamed on the wonders of electricity, software with unexpected behaviour cannot be excused by the underlying algorithms.

Grandiose assertions could distract from seemingly less important things: In order to leverage the data, which fuels the new technology, tech-companies must conduct an activity called ‘Web scrapping”. Doing so respecting different copyright licences, terms of services, and conventions like the  "robots.txt"  is something that was always difficult to achieve. Big tech companies bring a new quality to this field. It is now the renowned companies that simply ignore all written and unwritten rules and conventions that protect our publicly available data.

Intellectual property infringement should not be something only people trying to watch their favorite movies for free are accountable for. Such activities can actually harm creatives. As an example, I am not likely to find work bootstrapping a new MVP completely from scratch anymore, as the AI can do that now. All of AIs promises, hopes, clouds, vibes, and effects would disappear overnight if big tech-companies had to actually stick to rules. Access to virtually the whole internet as training data is a prerequisite for AI as we know it today.

We should not let the public discourse escape into exaggerated narratives that distract from a reasoned debate and tackling the challenges at hand. Of course technology can be frightening, that is why we have building codes, safety inspections for elevators, really boring rules about fire protection and whole industries that are heavily regulated like commercial air-traffic. An Airline company can hardly blame hazards to its customers on the grounds that building and flying planes is hard or unforeseeable winds.

We already have enough new and old technology to make our lives miserable without AI. What is preventing that from happening is good governance, social contracts, regulations, treaties and simply people living their ordinary lives without publicly proclaiming an eminent dystopia. It’s not the technology that causes hazards, it is the companies that use it wrongly and get away with it.

The future is not predetermined by spontaneous technological disruptions, economic fluctuations or self-proclaimed tech-prophets, it is made. Our future problems may not be engineering problems, they will be challenges solved by a healthy public discourse, good legitimized governance, enforcing the law on everyone equally and regulations for industries that can’t handle it by themselves.

We should not listen to dramatic rhetorics offering no second choices. My personal impression is that some already seem to be living in a new imagined sphere where inconvenient rules and conventions can be blatantly ignored. We should stop listening to the doomers. It is not a technology that is challenging the status quo, big tech companies are.