CEOs of artificial intelligence companies usually seek to minimize the threats posed by AI, rather than play them up. But on this week’s episode of Converge, Clara Labs co-founder and CEO Maran Nelson tells us there is real reason to be worried about AI — and not for the reasons that science fiction has trained us to expect.
Movies like Her and Ex Machina depict a near future in which anthropomorphic artificial intelligences manipulate our emotions and even commit violence against us. But threats like Ex Machina’s Ava will require several technological breakthroughs before they’re even remotely plausible, Nelson says. And in the meantime, actual state-of-the-art AI — which uses machine learning to make algorithmic predictions — is already causing harm.
“Over the course of the next five years, as companies continue to get better and better at building these technologies, the public at large will not understand what it is that is being done with their data, what they’re giving away, and how they should be scared of the ways that AI is already playing in and with their lives and information,” Nelson says.
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