We all have a problem right now with the news from OpenAI:
It was kind of obvious before, but the literature is now pretty clear that social media use is contributing to a significant rise in depression and suicide, especially amongst young girls. Sites that we use to send messages to each other, share photos, and like each other's stuff is literally causing us to get sad and kill ourselves.
Technology people (like me), no matter how well-intentioned, are not policy people, philosophers, ethicists, economists, sociologists, or psychologists -- yet technologists wield insane influence over all of us, putting our entire civilization in experiment after experiment, with little predictive power about (and sometimes regard for) the outcome.
Most of the time, I'm not bothered by this. I'm personally happy to move fast and break things when it comes to technologies that have a small blast radius (e.g., DoorDash or AirBnB.) But, in this space, I believe we need inscrutable, transparent, "civilian" leadership that prioritizes caution and concern for our collective humanity. If we can't predict what the "Like" button will do, how could we predict what an increasingly powerful AI will do? There are so many more degrees of freedom on this thing.
I don't think an AGI is going to Skynet us anytime soon, but I know that they can't predict what these tools will do to our broader society. OpenAI continually presented itself as the type of thoughtful, conservative philosopher-king we needed to usher this technology into the world -- yet they may have fallen prey to the same petty, human politics that we can't afford to have at the top of this space. I hope that OpenAI or Microsoft can create the right organizational structure to get there, and our governments can figure out their role to play -- but I don't see much reason for optimism at the moment.
Note: All of the above might be hastily and retroactively justified ranting born out of fear that without ChatGPT, I may have to remember how to write big chunks of Python on my own. 😰