Have you looked at the list of authors on the paper? If you are not familiar with these people and their work then I suggest that you do some reading and thinking.
I have an experience to share. I was there at the start of the web in the sense that I was building early web servers. I contributed nothing, but I was very excited and interested - as were tens of thousands of Computer Scientists.
I did not imagine any of the negative consequences of the web that have emerged. Very few people did. The community was blindsided, and I think that we have a reasonable excuse, just as a person t-boned on a junction has a reasonable excuse. We didn't see it coming, and it had never happened to us before.
With AI the fears and concerns raised in the media are mostly stupid, but there are genuine potential societal harms in terms of loss of freedom, dignity and opportunity that could easily arise if we don't set the system to favour human values over commercial and state ones.
We will not have the excuse of ignorance and surprise this time, and so I salute informed, reasonable and open people who are making the effort to engage with these issues.
And did your early experience make you "foresee" the future negative developments? Reading back into those days, the biggest fear seems to be the loss of jobs and human isolation, nobody predicted privacy. Making highly speculative policy predictions and then basing decisions upon them runs the risk of attacking the wrong problems at the wrong time or retarding progress for the wrong reasons.
Yes, there are risks in foresight and avoidance. Drivers can swerve into oncoming traffic and so forth. However I posit that for every driver that swerves into danger there are scores or more who swerve out of harm's way.
The point of my post was that I did not foresee, nor did almost anyone, but we were idealistic and as a community we had not had the pervasive impact that Computer Science has now had on people's lives. We now have a far greater resource, experience and responsibility to innovate responsibly and with care. Delinquent and careless research that creates harm is unacceptable.
I have an experience to share. I was there at the start of the web in the sense that I was building early web servers. I contributed nothing, but I was very excited and interested - as were tens of thousands of Computer Scientists.
I did not imagine any of the negative consequences of the web that have emerged. Very few people did. The community was blindsided, and I think that we have a reasonable excuse, just as a person t-boned on a junction has a reasonable excuse. We didn't see it coming, and it had never happened to us before.
With AI the fears and concerns raised in the media are mostly stupid, but there are genuine potential societal harms in terms of loss of freedom, dignity and opportunity that could easily arise if we don't set the system to favour human values over commercial and state ones.
We will not have the excuse of ignorance and surprise this time, and so I salute informed, reasonable and open people who are making the effort to engage with these issues.