Letters submitted by BDN readers are verified by BDN Opinion Page staff. Send your letters to letters@bangordailynews.com
After reading Dario Amodei’s recent essay about artificial intelligence, something occurred to me.
The situation we are in is caused by the tech culture we’ve seen develop beginning in the early 2000s, whereby these companies move very fast inside a culture of “make it, break it, fix it, continue.” This method of development gave us the amazing technology we see today — and has made billionaires. The problem was that most of this technology wasn’t inherently dangerous.
The analogy I would pose is nuclear weapons and nuclear energy: Imagine if during its development, we were not aware of how truly dangerous it was and used the same mentality of rapid progress “make it, break it, fix it” or if Boeing had the same approach of building aircraft.
My prayer is that the news of late, and the dire warnings within, will force these tech geniuses to slow down, realize that they are creating something akin to a nuclear bomb and that they can’t screw it up, or its armageddon.
I think this will be humanity’s biggest test since we harnessed the power of the atom.
They all need this Hindu quote posted on the front of their laptops, from the Hindu text, famously quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer when he witnessed the first atomic bomb explode: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds”
Joshua Reynolds
Carrabassett Valley