Did we have some ethics discussion when the lightbulb was invented? Or when the car was invented?
No, and if we did, we couldn't have foreshadowed all the positive and negative impacts.
My grandfather always told me that back in the days, "smart" people said that no train should be allowed to go faster than 50km/h because the heart would explode.
Nobody here can say that he wasn't impressed by ChatGPT.
How could we express anything but fear about something that impress us?
Heck. Plato and Socrates questioned the value of the written word, arguing that it would impair the shared memory of events and the only way to impart knowledge is by speaking face to face.
> that no train should be allowed to go faster than 50km/h
"There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women's bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed."
The book Spinal Catastrophism has a great section on "railway spine"--really weird stuff.
>Of particular interest to me as a Victorianist is Moynihan’s account of “railway spine” or “Erichsen’s disease,” a name for an amorphous set of neurological conditions believed to be caused by the jolting experiences of acceleration during railway travel. When autopsies revealed no somatic sources that could cause such effects like loss of memory, sleep disturbances, or back pain, the condition came under increasing scrutiny as such conditions were being inconsistently claimed by people who were not even present at any railway accidents but were merely witnesses. Used by some to sue the railways and others to claim disability to avoid work, “railway spine” became the center of debates about its veracity, resulting in contrasting theories that modern train travel led to the devolution of the spine itself to its primordial layers or that such conditions were merely another manifestation of hysteria and hypochondria. Given that hysteria was typically associated with women (the disease of the “wandering womb”), “railway spine” became the hysterical condition of men whose traumatic experiences of modernity were leaving them recumbent, as opposed to firm and upright.
Yes, you're right, there were many studies made by the companies building those and the companies against those.
And now that you mention it, I remember a class I had called "Ethics & computer science".
I guess I should have thought more about expressing my idea that whatever ethics work we might setup "now", we won't be able to predict the advantage & disadvantage of any technology in the future.
Whatever restriction we'll set in place would be based on our actual cultural situation.
I think this fear is natural whenever some kind of new tech is invented.
But I also think it's a mistake to say that no new form of tech can end the world, just because the world hasn't ended yet.
Lightbulbs, and cars, and fast trains, are not intelligence. Intelligence is a qualitative difference. GPT isn't going to end the world, but how many years do we have before someone creates something that is much smarter than humans? Even if it's as smart as humans, but thinks a lot faster, and doesn't get tired, and doesn't get hungry, or bored?
We couldn't forsee the positive and negative consequences of light bulbs because we couldn't predict what humans would do with them. But it was never going to be that humans use lightbulbs to end humanity. With AI, it's not whether humans will use it to end humanity, it's whether the AI decides to end humanity itself, a question that we've never had to ask for any other form of technology.
There was a whole panic where mobile phones were thought to melt your brain. Similar with radio. Some belived TV would literally give you square eyes. Vaccines. The internet was simultaneously apocalyptic and useless.
No, and if we did, we couldn't have foreshadowed all the positive and negative impacts.
My grandfather always told me that back in the days, "smart" people said that no train should be allowed to go faster than 50km/h because the heart would explode.
Nobody here can say that he wasn't impressed by ChatGPT.
How could we express anything but fear about something that impress us?