It's not the technology that should be feared it is the people using the technology.
From Observer, May 14:
“It’s hard to rank the A.I. players, who you trust the most, or least."
Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford computer scientist regarded as the “godmother of A.I.” in Silicon Valley, doesn’t believe one should trust any single A.I. company as the technology advances rapidly and raises complicated questions around its ethical and fair use. “It’s hard to rank the A.I. players, who you trust the most, or least. My trust is in the collective solutions we create together. The founding fathers [of the U.S.] did not put trust in a single person, and so my hope is not in a single A.I., it is in people,” Li said during an interview at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco last week.
Li currently co-directs Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute and advises the Biden Administration on tech policies. When asked about her thoughts on rising concerns about the potential harm of A.I., she said much of the fear around A.I. “belongs to the world of sci-fi.”
“There’s nothing wrong about pondering about all this,” she said. “But compared to the other, actual social risks—whether it’s the disruption of disinformation and misinformation to our democratic process, or, you know, the kind of labor market shift or privacy issues—these are true social risks that we have to face because they impact real peoples’ real life.”
“Our collective will, our responsibility, is to create trustworthy A.I., and there are many people in the industry working on that,” she added. “I worry about real catastrophic social risks, that is more important. We need to be cognizant of labor market shifts and social risks.”
Li received the “godmother of A.I.” moniker for her early work at Princeton University pioneering a massive database called ImageNet that laid the foundation for modern A.I. systems. Li remembered 2007 as “an inflection point in the business intelligence industry,” where the role of data would change dramatically. “We couldn’t have dreamed at that point that the big new world of new networked GPTs would develop, or that we would be talking to President Biden and Congress about how should they use that power,” she said....
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