The AI’s Twilight Zone: we’re cooked, aren’t we?
Welcome to the Twilight Zone of technology, where nightmares blur with reality and machines scheme to outsmart us.
Image by Cybernews.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone of technology, where nightmares blur with reality and machines scheme to outsmart us.
Last night, when troubled by endless nightmares, I decided to wake up (yes, that's a thing). I sat up in bed only to discover that a smiling dude with a beard was staring at me. I blinked, convinced I was still sleeping, but he was still there for a couple more seconds. In the morning, when I was trying to tell this non-story to my partner, I showed him my heart rate stats on my Garmin as if a random heart rate spike to 143 bpm in the middle of the night was any proof of what I saw.
But, given our overtrust in technology, I wouldn't be surprised if this random flash of data had served my argument.
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During the past week, Cybernews journalists have revealed quite a few ‘stranger things’ that showcase how upside-down everything might be.
Did you know that OpenAI’s new large language model, o1, can lie and scheme in order to “survive”? Does that mean that, eventually, a machine will disobey human commands? For now, OpenAI says that “it is unlikely that such instances would lead to catastrophic outcomes.”
However, given the speed at which we are approaching artificial general intelligence (AGI,) the research is more than concerning.
While we dread the advent of autonomous robots, our interactions with AI bots have already proven harmful in many ways. Americans spend an average of $1,000 during the festive season, with 8% of them going into debt. One study argues that AI contributes to overspending. How?
Through AI, users receive personalized experiences and even tailored pricing. Coupled with a seamless purchase process where you can buy items directly from videos, technology is eliminating the "pain of payment," simply encouraging us to spend more.
There’s also been a couple of outages this past week, including some downtime for Facebook and Instagram. The funniest – yet troubling in so many ways – was the ChatGPT and Sora outage. “I’m cooked,” one student said, but oh boy, aren’t we all “cooked” if millions of papers being turned in are written with AI?
We could go as far as rephrasing famous Marshall McLuhan's quote and say that AI [originally – medium] is an extension of man.
The evolution of homo technicus has already begun. At least that’s what authors of a new “Genesis,” namely, the late Henry Kissinger, Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, and Craig Mundie, claim.
Are we evolving in tandem with technology, though? Or are we losing important skills and characteristics that once made us human?
Up for more? Check our latest episodes of the Cybernews weekly podcast, where we discuss Russian hacker tactics, Pegasus spyware, and Altman's latest shenanigans.
For more thought-provoking lists, check the list of my favorite five articles that we covered. Bonus content – our exclusive documentary on how hackers earn $800K in a weekend.
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