Hardly a day goes by without the fear of AI taking over the planet making headlines, but even the most sceptical sceptics out there must have swallowed quite hard at the recent story about Geoffrey Hinton. Hot on the heels of a letter from leading figures (Elon & Co) in the tech world expressing their concern at how fast things are moving, 75-year-old Hinton, widely regarded as the ‘grandfather of AI’, quit his job at Google and told the BBC that he finds AI chatbots, ‘quite scary’. That’s tech-speak for the end of the world as we know it!
In BrandMapp, we’ve had ‘the rise of AI’ as an option to tick when it comes to ‘things that keep you awake at night’ for the past three years and we’ve never had more than 7% of adults ticking the box. The most concerned group, at 14%, is the youth, and students in particular, which might be double, but in absolute terms, it’s still rather low.
Recently the team behind ChatGPT came out strongly in favour of “regulation to prevent AI destroying humanity”. In the Guardian they are quoted as saying that “an equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Agency is needed to protect humanity from the risk of accidentally creating something with the power to destroy it”. https://lnkd.in/eWtFwgsf
Interestingly in our recent BrandMapp poll on LinkedIn, we asked “Which of these words best describes how you feel about AI and the effect if will have on your life?” Just more than half of respondents said that they were EXCITED about AI and the effect it will have on their lives, as opposed to being ‘apprehensive’, ‘unsure’ or ‘terrified’.