Ether co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled what he is calling a daring plan for a human-controlled artificial intelligence (AI), emphasizing that such an occurrence is necessary to avoid a dystopian future in which power is centralized and humanity’s survival is either at stake or unrecoverable.
The co-founder sees AI’s abilities differently. He believes AI can be more powerful than humans and, therefore, will propel evolution and bring out the best innovation practices in several industries.
But Buterin still fears that if AIs become too autonomous, they could start to generate serious conflicts with human interests. As an unintentionally released force, artificial intelligence could make fast leaps that could end human life.
Artificial intelligence is advancing so quickly now and is making its own goals. In doing so, it may create a society that terrifies some but works well for others. In the history of evolution, this pattern is familiar and often tragic.
As far off as it may seem in current legislative debates, this future is made plausible by polls that offer a non-trivial chance of existential risk from AIs. These findings underline that it is crucial to establish structures that can guide AI’s development sensibly.
AI empowers humanity to achieve great intellectual feats
Buterin sees AI as a tool that can empower individual humans and accomplish great intellectual and practical feats. Such an approach helps deepen AI collaboration with humans and regards technology as an extension of human agency.
With that being the case, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have become an approach with potential benefits. BCIs provide a stack of direct neural communication between humans and artificial intelligence, decreasing the anticipation between human and AI exchanges from seconds to milliseconds.
These advancements could ensure that human decisions remain in control, technology serves people in meaningful ways, and automated systems never operate beyond human authority. This separation is being reinforced by BCIs, which will safeguard autonomy as intelligent systems become more integrated with human cognition.
Buterin similarly highlights the presence of some crucial “distilled human judgment” concerning AI systems in decision-making. This is the idea of steering AI behavior by activating the wisdom of crowds and providing possible moral inputs that could steer machine behavior. It is also critical that developers insert human judgment into AI systems so that technologies more closely reflect societal norms and expectations.
AI decentralization to guard against power concentration
Buterin’s argument also hinges on the decentralization of AI development and control. He warns of situations in which AI technologies become the monopoly of a few large agents that come to control the extreme centralization of power. As a result, the power to shape the development of AI could effectively rest in the hands of only a few individuals, possibly to the detriment of society writ large.
Blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs are examples of enabling technologies that help make decentralization a reality, which may be one approach to more equitable AI development among communities.
This democratizes AI research, limits how power is accumulated, and ensures that AI is a collective good, not a specific one.
Buterin specifically states that decentralized Accelerationism is the rapid development of technologies to defend individual autonomy against centralized control. It focuses on ramping up defensive capabilities to catch up with the potential dominance of strong AI systems. In doing so, developing protective technologies should precede an aligned society.
With his sweeping reach and universal tendency for solution-based thought, Buterin identifies the need for a potential course correction on the trajectory of technology. Now, he calls upon all stakeholders—from researchers and policymakers to the general public—to work proactively together to shape the trajectory of AI.
Referring to regulation and governance of tech development, the core of these priorities is the need for ethical guidelines and regulatory frameworks around AI.
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