The launch last November of ChatGPT set off a worldwide wave of hysteria that perhaps the end of humanity was nigh: AI would soon render humans irrelevant or turn us into subservient serfs to super smart, superpowerful high-tech monsters.
We should recall what President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address at a time of genuine crisis, the pit of the Great Depression: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
AI will actually be a boon to numerous industries, especially health care. It will, for instance, vastly speed up the creation of new medicines, instead of our being reliant on the highly inefficient, hit-or-miss approach of the past.
AI is in its infancy. We’re in the same stage with it that we were with PCs and the first cellular phones decades ago. Regulating AI when we don’t know what it can do is preposterous and destructive. As it evolves, we can enact sensible guardrails. The dread that AI will someday create sentient, independentminded robots or entities with humanlike consciousness is overwrought. More than 200 years ago people were fascinated and frightened by electricity. This was the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein, in which a scientist using electricity creates a monster. That was science fiction. So are the wild worries about AI.
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