The Missing Voice In AI Design. Ours.

By Karen and Erica

Generative AI is changing the world, and the pace is speeding up. Decisions are being made now. Our participation is critical.  Why? Because we are experienced and we can think.

First, just before the Davos meetings, we heard, not for the first time, that AI is drastically changing the workplace in ways that affect how we live.  

Artificial intelligence is coming for your job: 41% of employers intend to downsize their workforce as AI automates certain tasks, a World Economic Forum survey showed Wednesday.

Out of hundreds of large companies surveyed around the world, 77% also said they were planning to reskill and upskill their existing workers between 2025-2030 to better work alongside AI, according to findings published in the WEF’s Future of Jobs Report. But, unlike the previous, 2023 edition, this year’s report did not say that most technologies, including AI, were expected to be “a net positive” for job numbers.

“Advances in AI and renewable energy are reshaping the (labor) market — driving an increase in demand for many technology or specialist roles while driving a decline for others, such as graphic designers,” the WEF said in a press release ahead of its annual meeting in Davos later this month.

Soon after came a report of Citrini Research, entitled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. It is a thought experiment, written as of 2028, contemplating the possible effects on everything of ever-smarter Large Language Models. Its conclusion:

For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input. Capital was abundant (or at least, replicable). Natural resources were finite but substitutable. Technology improved slowly enough that humans could adapt. Intelligence, the ability to analyze, decide, create, persuade, and coordinate, was the thing that could not be replicated at scale.

Human intelligence derived its inherent premium from its scarcity. Every institution in our economy, from the labor market to the mortgage market to the tax code, was designed for a world in which that assumption held.

We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium. Machine intelligence is now a competent and rapidly improving substitute for human intelligence across a growing range of tasks. The financial system, optimized over decades for a world of scarce human minds, is repricing. That repricing is painful, disorderly, and far from complete.

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This is the first time in history the most productive asset in the economy has produced fewer, not more, jobs. Nobody’s framework fits, because none were designed for a world where the scarce input became abundant. So we have to make new frameworks. Whether we build them in time is the only question that matters.

And finally, we read an astonishing paper, entitled The Adolescence of Technology, by Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic. He lays out the possible risks of LLMs that are smarter than humans and work far faster:

• Autonomy risks. What are the intentions and goals of this country? Is it hostile, or does it share our values? Could it militarily dominate the world through superior weapons, cyber operations, influence operations, or manufacturing?

• Misuse for destruction. Assume the new country is malleable and “follows instructions”—and thus is essentially a country of mercenaries. Could existing rogue actors who want to cause destruction (such as terrorists) use or manipulate some of the people in the new country to make themselves much more effective, greatly amplifying the scale of destruction?

• Misuse for seizing power. What if the country was in fact built and controlled by an existing powerful actor, such as a dictator or rogue corporate actor? Could that actor use it to gain decisive or dominant power over the world as a whole, upsetting the existing balance of power?

• Economic disruption. If the new country is not a security threat in any of the ways listed in #1–3 above but simply participates peacefully in the global economy, could it still create severe risks simply by being so technologically advanced and effective that it disrupts the global economy, causing mass unemployment or radically concentrating wealth?

• Indirect effects. The world will change very quickly due to all the new technology and productivity that will be created by the new country. Could some of these changes be radically destabilizing?

Read the paper to get the full picture of Amodei’s views, which are not all negative. And note the real world impacts. Just as an example, apparently, one of the points of dissent in the recent dispute between Anthropic and the secretary of war was whether a human should be involved in the decision to use nuclear weapons.

Why are we talking about this on Lustre? Because we Lustre Ladies are a vital part of the world. Generative AI may be changing many aspects of life in amazing ways, but AI is not changing humans, or human behavior. We know a lot about both. 

We have said before that having only younger people, and mostly men, involved in key decisions about AI, is unwise. Those of us who have lived for decades have perspective that no-one who has not lived as long as we could possibly have–an asset of great value that is often overlooked. It goes without saying that women have different views than men. And we have many, many years of problem-solving experience–centuries, if you add it all up.  We will be around for decades, but the authors of these papers seem to think there is a risk that the world could end before then, partly because we have let AI thinking take over human concepts. We have no idea if they are right, but we feel it unwise to ignore their concerns. We want to participate in the problem-solving that is going on right now. And we should.

So let’s find a way. Suggestions welcome.