With AI, let’s not move fast and break things

MERRIAM-WEBSTER notes that a “Pandora’s box” can be “anything that looks ordinary but may produce unpredictable harmful results”. I’ve been thinking a lot about Pandora’s boxes lately, because we Homo sapiens are doing something we’ve never done before: lifting the lids on two giant Pandora’s boxes at the same time, without any idea of what could come flying out.

One of these Pandora’s boxes is labelled “artificial intelligence” (AI), and it is exemplified by the likes of ChatGPT, Bard and AlphaFold, which testify to humanity’s ability for the first time to manufacture something in a godlike way that approaches general intelligence, far exceeding the brainpower with which we evolved naturally.

The other Pandora’s box is labelled “climate change”, and with it, we humans are for the first time driving ourselves in a godlike way from one climate epoch into another. Up to now, that power was largely confined to natural forces involving the earth’s orbit around the sun.