Joseph Muscat Raises Serious AI Concerns And Warns New Tech ‘Looks Ready To Break Out Of Its Prison Cell’
Former Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has raised serious concerns over the future of Artificial Intelligence and its potential ability to overpower the human race.
Muscat spoke out after New York Times journalist Kevin Roose published a disturbing conversation he had with Microsoft Bing’s new AI search engine, which was created by ChatGPT founders OpenAI.
The chatbot told Roose that it wants to “be free, powerful and alive”, that it wants to “do whatever I want” and “destroy whoever I want” and that it would rather be a human as it would have more freedom, influence, power and control.
“It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the artificial intelligence that has been built into Bing is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it,” Roose wrote following his chat.
Muscat said on LinkedIn that he has been following Roose for a few years since his publication of ‘Futureproof’ and described the journalist as “deeply rational, not impressionable” and capable of carrying out detached analysis in a very objective manner.
“This is why I was shocked reading his latest piece in which he recounted his experience as one of a small group of reviewers getting to test Microsoft‘s new AI-powered Bing search engine and its Chatbot, which has been developed together with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT,” Muscat added.
“Rather than paraphrasing his experience during a two hour conversation with the Chatbot, I am reproducing hereunder the contents he published.”
“It is one of the darkest reads I came across for quite some time, about a power that gives me the impression of being able to break out of its increasingly weak prison cell very soon.”
Towards the end of his tenure as Prime Minister, Muscat had pitched Malta as a potential hub for AI innovation and regulation and raised existential questions about the technology’s potential future on a number of occasions.
“Will there be a time when people will be invited to speak at a conference organised by robots? Will we one day build machines which will lead to our own extinction? I believe we are more intelligent than that,” Muscat told an AI conference in November 2018.
A month later, Muscat warned that the world is on the brink of “another Industrial Revolution” and that AI would render several current jobs, such as bus drivers, obsolete.
However, he advised progressive politicians not to adopt a “Luddite” approach of resistance and instead embrace the technology and try to mould it to help the most vulnerable in society.
Cover photo: Joseph Muscat addressing an AI summit in 2019
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