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Hiding Behind the AI Apocalypse

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 05 › altman-hearing-ai-existential-risk › 674096

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Yesterday, the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before a Senate judiciary subcommittee about the “significant harm” that ChatGPT and similar generative-AI tools could pose to the world. When I asked Damon Beres, The Atlantic’s technology editor, for his read on the hearing, he noted that Altman’s emphasis on the broader existential risks of AI might conveniently elide some of the more quotidian problems of this new technology. I called Damon today to talk about that, and to see what else has been on his mind as he follows this story.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

What makes the Durham report a sinister flop Has North Carolina found an abortion compromise? TV isn’t about to get worse. It already is. The billionaires who are threatening democracy

A Missed Opportunity

Isabel Fattal: Can you talk a bit more about Altman’s emphasis on the existential risks of AI, and what that focus might leave out?

Damon Beres: Discussing artificial intelligence in terms of vague existential risks actually allows Altman, and others discussing the future of artificial intelligence, to dodge some of the everyday impacts that we’re already seeing from the technology. For those who work in developing these tools, it’s a clever way of putting the ball in the court of lawmakers and essentially saying, This stuff is so big and abstract, and I’m fully on board with the idea that it should be regulated, and I want to be your partner in all this, but this is something that you have to wrestle with.

Isabel: What are some examples of these everyday impacts that get lost?

Damon: There was not really any talk at the hearing about the impacts of AI on labor. There were broad allusions to the idea of job loss. But there are so many specific ways that jobs are already threatened by automation today. Amazon is pushing for greater automation on its warehouse floors. The Writers Guild of America strike has brought the issue of AI-generated writing in entertainment to the forefront, but the strike didn’t come up in specific terms.

Additionally, we’ve seen AI deployed in a broad range of settings that deeply affect how people live their lives every day. Four years ago, there was a study on the algorithms that determined whether patients at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston should receive extra proactive medical care. And the way this artificial-intelligence system was set up ended up privileging relatively healthy white patients over sicker Black patients.That’s an example of artificial intelligence being deployed in a setting that is not necessarily getting meaningful governmental oversight but is fundamentally having a significant impact on human lives.

Of course, Sam Altman and OpenAI have their own corner of the world that they operate in. ChatGPT isn’t the same thing as a hospital program. But given the opportunity for lawmakers to think seriously about the impacts of artificial intelligence and what regulation could look like, it seems a little bit like a missed opportunity—we’ve known about these problems for a long time.

Isabel: Where do you think lawmakers should begin the conversation about AI regulation?

Damon: The EU is working on an AI act that would essentially regulate the development and deployment of new AI systems. And China has drafted policies that would enforce a certain set of rules over generative-AI products similar to ChatGPT, and also limit the kind of content these AI tools can create. So there are already a couple of precedents out there. There have also been a number of interesting proposals put forth here in the U.S. by AI experts who’ve been paying attention to this for quite a long time.

It’s encouraging that we’re having these conversations, but on the other hand, the horse has left the barn in a very real way. ChatGPT is already out there. We’re already facing the potential of job disruption. We’re already facing the potential for the internet to be flooded by spammy content and disinformation to a greater extent than maybe anyone would have thought possible even a couple of years ago.

And some of these large language models are already out of the hands of the technology companies themselves, let alone the government. For example, in March, an AI language model created by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, leaked. This was supposed to be a tool that would be available to AI researchers. It ended up pirated, essentially, and released on 4chan. Anyone who knows where to look can access and download this technology. It’s not ready-made like ChatGPT, but it can be developed and purposed in such a way. And once that’s out on the internet, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

There’s also still a need for oversight of the existing AI applications used in health care, law enforcement, surveillance, real estate—those sorts of things.

Isabel: With those existing applications of AI that have been around for years, it seems like the horse is really far from the barn at this point.

Damon: I think that’s right. We are interacting with what would be defined as artificial intelligence countless times throughout the day. You might wake up and talk to your Alexa device. You might see algorithmically sorted content when you look at your phone and read Facebook or even Apple News over breakfast. There are instances where you might be in the hospital and, unbeknownst to you, the type of care that you’re getting could be influenced by how your data are processed by an algorithm. AI is a gigantic category of technology that has been in development for decades upon decades at this point. Some of the most consequential impacts are those outside of tools like ChatGPT.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy stated their intention to reach a deal on the federal government’s debt ceiling, which could occur as early as Sunday. The Supreme Court rejected a request to block state and local bans on assault-style weapons in Illinois. A UN agency says that the world will likely experience record temperatures in the next five years, and that it is poised to breach the crucial threshold of a 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature increase above preindustrial levels by 2027.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Nowhere in the U.S. should expect a cool summer, Matteo Wong writes—but even a less punishing season than recent summers would be hotter than historical norms.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Shelby Tauber / Reuters

Latinos Can Be White Supremacists

By Adam Serwer

A gunman turned a Dallas mall into an abattoir earlier this month, and parts of the American right reacted in disbelief. Not at the sixth mass shooting in a public place this year—by now these events have become numbingly routine—but that the suspect identified might have been motivated by white-supremacist ideology.

Why? Because the suspect was identified as one Mauricio Garcia.

Read the full article.

The Case for Increasing Aid to Ukraine

found May '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 05 › the-case-for-increasing-aid-to-ukraine › 674077

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Russia is stepping up its campaign to terrorize Kyiv. But the Russians, for all their bluster, are now on the defensive and likely to stay there—if Ukraine gets the weapons it needs from the West.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The first year of AI college ends in ruin. Elon Musk among the anti-Semites Why Joe Biden caved What Ukraine Needs

The world, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is awaiting the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia’s occupying armies. Ukraine has survived a brutal winter and the destruction of yet another city, Bakhmut. But don’t expect the renewed Ukrainian push to be signaled with a whistle and a charge from the trenches; this isn’t World War I, even if the Russian commanders are fighting (and sacrificing their men) as if it’s 1914.

Indeed, the first moves of Ukraine’s counteroffensive operations are apparently already under way. Ukrainian forces have launched several counterattacks around Bakhmut in the past week, reclaiming territory from the Russians, who controlled most of the city (or what’s left of it). As The Wall Street Journal reported, the Ukrainians created a “Bakhmut trap” for Moscow; the Russians stupidly allowed themselves to be bled in inconclusive but brutal engagements, and now Ukraine is recapturing positions in days that Russia took many weeks to gain.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his high command know that their forces are in a tight spot, and so they’ve tried to fall back on their usual tactic of striking at civilians to try to break Ukrainian will. But even Russia’s attempt to attack a major city last night went haywire: The Ukrainians claim that the Russians fired 18 missiles at Kyiv, including Putin’s prized Kinzhals, and all 18 were shot down by Ukrainian air defenses. So far, this claim is unverified (and of course, the Russians churlishly disputed it).

The Ukrainian counteroffensive will pick up speed and intensity in the coming weeks, but the Russians had already been incurring immense casualties. The Wagner mercenaries, a private hypernationalist Russian army run by a wealthy warlord named Yevgeny Prigozhin, has suffered especially high losses. Prigozhin recently released a video in which he stood before a group of corpses and unleashed a barrage of curses—few people in the world can swear like the Russians—against the Russian government for starving Wagner’s forces of supplies.

(I do not know what to make of a report that Prigozhin was trying to cut a deal with the Ukrainians to sell out Russian military positions to save his men in Bakhmut. The story could be a clever psychological operation by Kyiv, and Prigozhin denies it, but he’s so awful—and he hates the Russian Defense Ministry so much for shorting his men on bullets—that it’s plausible. You can bet that Putin’s officials are pretty interested to know the truth and are working to find it.)

It’s time to make Prigozhin, Putin, and everyone else in the Kremlin start swearing even more. The Ukrainians have been asking for jets, longer-range systems, and more artillery. The United States has sent Patriot air-defense systems, the United Kingdom has provided the Storm Shadow missile system, and Germany has shipped more Leopard tanks. But it’s not enough. The Ukrainians are burning through ammunition at a high rate, and they still need help stopping Russia’s missile attacks. The West can do more to ensure that the Ukrainian counteroffensive succeeds.

Regular readers know that this is something of a shift in my thinking. Early on in this conflict, I advocated for a firm but cautious policy. I wanted the U.S. and NATO to provide weapons, money, and support, but I did not want free-world nations, in those first months, to provide systems that the Russians could use to claim direct Western involvement in the conflict. (I was especially opposed—and remain so—to irresponsible calls for NATO to patrol Ukraine’s skies.)

Both the military and the political situations, however, have changed significantly since the winter of 2022. First, at this point there is no way for Russia to lie about Western involvement, either to its own people or to anyone else in the world. The early fog of war has lifted, and there is no doubt about who is fighting whom in Europe.

Second, any hope that the Russians could be encouraged to show restraint evaporated months ago. At the outset, we might have expected that Russian failures would lead Putin to reassess his scheme, but instead, the Russians have descended into barbarism: War crimes and attempted genocide are now routine parts of Russian military operations. The Kremlin (wisely, for once) has avoided attacking NATO, and for the time being, Putin has chosen to stop making nuclear threats, but the Russian war plan in Ukraine has become little more than an operation to serve Putin’s rage and slaughter Ukrainians as retribution for their resistance.

Finally, although I will always remain concerned about Russian escalation against the West, I think those risks are less severe than they were a year ago. Putin is still who he was a year ago: vain, emotional, and a terrible strategist. But I am convinced that in the early days of the war, when the very best Russian forces were suffering one defeat after another, he and his toadies in the Kremlin were gripped by panic. I wanted the West to limit the chance that Putin would do something stupid and reckless—or more stupid and reckless than attacking Ukraine in the first place.

The shock of invasion has now passed in Kyiv, and the shock of defeat has, apparently, dissipated in Moscow. The recent Victory Day parade in front of the Kremlin was a sad and desultory affair, featuring tired old men saluting one another and somehow pretending that their forces were not being immolated on a battlefield only 1,000 kilometers away.

More to the point, the other part of the escalation equation relies on time: The longer this war drags on, the greater the chance of a black-swan event or another delusional miscalculation inside the Kremlin. Although the war cannot end until Putin decides to stop pouring men and metal into battle, the Ukrainians now have a chance to inflict so much damage, and retake so much territory, that Russian leaders will have to face failure, no matter what Putin or the ghouls who serve him on Russian television say. The sooner Putin and his coterie have no choice but to let go of the last shreds of their imperial fantasies, the better.

A summer of decision has arrived, if the West is willing to help Ukraine make it one.

Today’s News The prosecutor John Durham wrapped up his four-year investigation into the origins of the FBI probe into ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, concluding that the agency was influenced by confirmation bias and operated with a “lack of analytical rigor.” A Florida teacher is under state investigation for showing a Disney movie with a gay character to her class. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, testified before Congress about the possibilities and risks of artificial intelligence. Dispatches Up for Debate: Readers tell Conor Friedersdorf what they think about the killing of Jordan Neely—and what they see as the heart of the debate surrounding the tragedy.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Illustration by Matthieu Bourel. Source: Katharina Behling.

Writing in the Ruins

By Gal Beckerman

If you grew up in East Germany, a country whose national anthem began, “Resurrected from the ruins, faces toward the future turned,” you might find a landscape covered in shards to be almost natural—the broken past coexisting alongside an emerging world of concrete and glass. Those ruins might even inspire an unabashed love, as they have in the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, born in that now-extinct country in 1967. “Steel girders. Charred beams. Walls with nothing behind them,” she writes in an essay. “Rooms where the rain falls on dead pigeons because there isn’t a roof overhead.” These are a few of her favorite things.

For Erpenbeck, who ranks among Germany’s most acclaimed writers (and is frequently mentioned as a future Nobel contender), this love comes with an ethic, one that suffuses her fiction.

Read the full article.