Last week, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher went public after resigning from his job at Anthropic, warning everyone about the extreme danger of AI getting out of control and making decisions that not only influence humans but could destroy the human race. One case where AI had almost taken over the stock market and made decisions better than any human could have caused a crash that would put the entire world into a panic. But some real person noticed it in time and it was shut down. Our governments have already acquired huge land sites to build enormous AI centres before setting some rules world-wide on how AI will be monitored and controlled.
Our Canadian farmers have, on two occasions, noticed some un-truths in articles that portrayed Canada’s supply management system as the main reason some dairy farmers quit. Luckily, some close neighbours and friends of those farmers knew the facts and blew the whistle on the writer of the article. He immediately removed the entire article within minutes. Once those articles are read by some people who know the real facts, it can make all AI written articles very suspicious. Every article that you read that is quite long and would take the average writer many many hours to research and write it, you can be pretty sure that it was written with AI because writers are too scarce and too busy to spend that much time writing one article. Often there are many articles in that daily news release that would take days for one writer to complete, but that column comes out daily.
On top of the arms race between global superpowers that we have been watching for generations, we now have an AI race. So, how did we get here? Last week there was a notice released by the boards of education. Countries that have been world leaders in knowledge are now noticing that students are falling behind in reading and math. Why? Since every smartphone and modern computer comes with a mathematics app and either Google or another search engine, students can save time by using the computer or smartphone to do calculations and research much faster than by reading books. Some students are using AI to write a thesis, stories, and even CVs for job applications. Spell-check is great for an old guy like me, but a combination of spell check and other AI grammar tools can completely change the subject that one is trying to write about. Every word and article must be proofread before it goes to press.
Some politicians seem to be using this opportunity to deliver messages that are not correct, but if stated often enough, people will believe them. Language is also being used as a weapon to restrict what part of the population can be told. Imagine what AI could do with that. Some very large corporations have used ghost writers to sway people’s opinions on the safety of many common foods. Wait until AI is used to confuse the truth with what someone wants you to believe.
Some good changes have already arrived. An app is now available either free or at a very low cost that can live-translate one language to another as you talk on the phone. For old guys like me, this is a saviour. Learning several new languages at my age would probably take longer than I’d be around. What does “bilingual” actually mean now? Who would have ever thought that technology would become the world’s biggest threat? Who would have thought that a drone, that only a few years ago was a toy, could take down a billion-dollar jet fighter?
Remember what artificial intelligence actually means! “Artificial” means not real, and intelligence only works if “common sense” is applied. The editor of this paper decided that AI articles have no place in this paper, and I could not agree more.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
