Suppose you had to die in a terrible artificial-intelligence-related cataclysm. Would you feel worse knowing the path to destruction was smoothed by the hubris of Silicon Valley tech lords pursuing dreams of utopia and immortality — or by the folly of Pentagon officials who give the AI a fateful dose of autonomy and power in the hopes of outcompeting the Russians or Chinese?
We spent the Cold War worrying mostly about military folly, and AI entered into our anxieties even then: the Soviet Doomsday Machine in “Dr. Strangelove,” the game-playing computer in “WarGames” and of course the fateful “Terminator” decision to make Skynet operational.
But for the last few years, as AI advances have concentrated potentially extraordinary power in the hands of a few companies and CEOs, it’s become more natural to worry more about private power and ambition, about would-be AI god-kings rather than presidents and generals.
Until, that is, the collision between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, the artificial intelligence pioneer, over whether Anthropic’s AI models should be bound by the company’s ethical constraints or made available for all uses by the Pentagon.
Since the two uses that Anthropic’s contract explicitly rules out are the employment of AI for mass surveillance and its use for fully autonomous weapons (meaning no humans in the to-kill-or-not-to-kill decision loop), it’s easy to get Skynet vibes from the Pentagon’s demands.