It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, or is it?

We feel fine.

By now, you’ve heard about rogue AI agents and the Hugging Face incident, or maybe you’ve heard about former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon warning that AI could wipe out humanity in the next decade?

Scary stuff. But how realistic is it?

By now, we all use AI tools in our day-to-day work, but with every tool, we still need oversight and edits to perfect the output. It feels unlikely that technology that only recently gave us extra fingers and hallucinations is now powerful enough to wipe out humanity of its own volition.

Alongside those lighting the beacons of warning, others call for more nuance about the potential fears.

According to a recent Forbes article, Bill Gates warns of AI’s rapid growth, stating that “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that … cause a billion deaths.” He, along with many others, calls for government regulations to curb the misuse of AI.

Rumman Chowdhury, former US science envoy for AI, “takes the skepticism a step further, questioning not just the odds of an AI-driven extinction event but the mechanics of how one would even happen. While AI could be used to help kill humans, she argues, it would need human involvement to set it off.”

And that sentiment is the crux of it, right? Humans are still the biggest threat to humans. We make, control, and use technology, so aren’t we the ones truly responsible for the outcomes?

We may be for now, but people worldwide are deeply divided while we struggle to understand the implications of rapidly evolving tech. Once again, our tools are evolving faster than humans can keep up with. The conversation around appropriate legal guardrails can’t move fast enough, and that is just the reality of the situation.

FROM THE FIELD

Despite the larger conversations, AI technology is being used in many ways to help us. Sometimes it even brings us closer together. 

Recently, we’ve had the opportunity to help bring a new AI-supported device to market, designed to help parents connect with their kids, and kids connect more with their schoolwork.

One of our biggest challenges on this project is the fear surrounding AI technology. Building a brand and a product like this, which has the potential to be very controversial, takes real nuance (and legal counsel) when a small misunderstanding in positioning could very well make or break the launch. 

This is exactly the kind of challenge we love taking on, and we’re excited to be working on bringing this new brand to market. Stay tuned for more as we get closer to the public debut.

GO TIME

There’s a lot of noise in the news; only you can filter it. 

We’ve been told for years now not to blindly trust AI, but we haven’t really been trained on how to challenge it. When we use AI to research, we have to remember to stay skeptical to improve our information literacy.

Example questions to ask:

• “Where did this come from (when a source isn’t already provided)?”

• “What are you least certain about?”

• “What might a reasonable person disagree with here?”

And most importantly: run your work through at least one additional tool AND independent sources to get more perspective.

Let’s hold ourselves accountable before others get the chance to.

YOUR TAKEAWAY

AI: our research assistant, grammar corrector, therapist, advisor, friend… and maybe our biggest foe.