When artificial general intelligence (AGI) eventually arrives, will it be our servant? Our master? Or something else altogether, maybe even something supernatural? As a routine precaution, I for one welcome whatever form our new AI creations take. But Meta maestro Mark Zuckerberg reckons his competition in the AI industry are actually suffering from what you might call a God delusion.
Speaking to YouTube channel Kallaway(via Tech Crunch), El Zuck took aim at what he sees as the competition’s overly messianic approach to AI development.
“I find it a pretty big turnoff when people in the tech industry talk about building this ‘one true AI,’. It’s almost as if they think they’re creating God or something. That’s not what we’re doing, I don’t think that’s how this plays out,” Zuckerberg said.
He also criticised what he saw as a monopolistic approach to AI development. “Some people are saying that there’s going to be the one true big AI that can do everything and I just don’t think that that’s the way that things tend to go. I get why if you’re in some AI lab you want to feel like what you’re doing is super important, like ‘we’re building the one true thing for the future’.”
“But I just think realistically that’s not that’s not how stuff works. It’s not like there was one app on people’s phones that people use. There’s not one creator that people want all their content from, there’s not one app that people want all their content from, there’s not one business that people want to buy everything from.”
He has a point, although he makes it without any sense of irony. After all, Meta gives every bit the impression of wanting to own absolutely as much of our digital lives as humanly possible.
