Bryan Cantrill shares his thought on the recent claims about AI wiping out humans.
to the degree that digital systems have agency in the physical world, it is agency that we — we humans with arms and legs and brains and parents and children — permit: AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control. Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world!
To those who — like Coxon — are gripped with unwavering fear, this will be of little solace. But to those who are hearing these fears for the first time: know that your incredulity is warranted. We should heed the wisdom of the late Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: the claims from Coxon and his ilk are the most extraordinary a technologist can make, and we must demand evidence commensurate with the claims.
That said, we should not expect the public to understand LLMs, critical infrastructure, bioweapons, extinction biology, etc. — that burden must lie with those making the claim. The lesson that I learned (shamefully) decades ago is that domain experts, by way of their expertise, implicitly hold the public’s trust — and we must not abuse it. It is incumbent upon us to be circumspect in our claims — and maximally so when raising the alarm.