AI Creators Discuss Risks, Opportunities, and Mechanisms that Make Humans Boring

“Humans are kinda boring, goodbye!” This is the personal prediction of one of the most important people you’ve probably never heard of. Artificial intelligence (AI) will replace humans in many roles.

Emad Mostak is the British founder of technology company Stability AI. He created Stable Diffusion, a tool that uses AI to analyze images found online and create images from simple text instructions.

AI will enable computers to think and act more like humans. This includes something called machine learning, which allows computers to learn what to do without a human sitting at a keyboard and typing commands to give them precise instructions. Last month, 1,000 experts warned of potential risks, saying the race to develop AI systems had spiraled out of control and issued a dramatic warning to halt its development.

In an interview to be shown in full on Sunday, technology founder Mostak said, “There are agents that are more capable than we are, out of our control, moving across the internet… What happens when we achieve Does that mean?

“The worst-case scenario is for it to multiply and basically take over humanity.”

That sounds scary, but he’s not the only one to point out the risks of not knowing what might happen next if we build computers that are smarter than us.

Mostak believes that an event in which risks suddenly become real could quickly shock governments into action. He pointed to the moment when Tom Hanks contracted COVID-19 and millions of people got up and paid attention.

When such a moment arrives, governments will conclude that “policy is needed now,” said the 40-year-old man.

For example, concerns spiked after a Republican attack ad against Joe Biden was created using a computer-generated fake image.

If there is a risk to the information that voters can rely on, Mostak said governments will have to address it.

Despite concerns, Mostak says the potential benefits of AI in almost every part of our lives could be enormous. But he acknowledged that the impact on jobs could be painful, at least initially.

Mostak said he believed AI would “have a bigger impact on the economy than the pandemic”, adding that it was “up to us to decide which way it goes”.

Some jobs will undoubtedly be lost, Goldman Sachs Bank suggested, 300 million little-understood roles could be lost or diminished by technological advances.

While no one wants to be replaced by robots, Mostak hopes that it will be “balanced with increased productivity” so that humans can focus on what makes them human and let machines do much of the rest. Because we can, better jobs will be created. He agrees with former UK Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Patrick Vallance that advances in AI and their impact could prove to be even greater than the Industrial Revolution.

Mostak, a modest mathematician, is the founder of a fledgling 2020 company already valued at $1 billion, including an influx from Hollywood stars Ashton Kutcher and others. More cash is pouring in, and it’s likely to appreciate even more in the near future. Some speculation puts its value at $4 billion.

Unlike some of his competitors, he is determined to keep his technology open source. In other words, anyone can see, share, and use the code. In his view, it should give the public some confidence in what is happening.

“I don’t think you should trust it,” he says.

“If you build an open model and do it publicly, you expect to be criticized for doing the wrong thing and praised for doing the right thing.”

But his business also raises serious questions about ownership and what is true. Photo agency Getty Images is suing them for infringing on the rights of the images it sells.

“If you have a robot that walks around and looks at things, does it have to close its eyes when it sees something?” says Mostak.

It is highly unlikely that the conversation will end there.

The entrepreneur believes the scale of what’s to come is huge. He believes that in 10 years, his company and fellow AI leaders ChatGPT and DeepMind will be even bigger than Google and Facebook. Technology predictions are just as sensitive as political predictions. An educated guess, but it could turn out to be completely wrong. What is clear, however, is that public debate about the risks and realities of AI is now underway. We may be in the midst of a massive change too big for one company, one country or one politician to manage.

More than 50 years after James Watt patented the steam engine, the first steam locomotives ran along the Darlington tracks. This time, it’s unlikely to take too long to get used to these new ideas, and it’s unlikely to get boring.

You can watch the details of Laura Kuensberg’s conversation with Emad Mostak live on BBC One or here on iPlayer tomorrow Sunday.