Wagner James Au
LinkedIn Post
Wagner James Au • Follower:in Author of “Making a Metaverse That Matters” & “Secrets of Game Design”; game/virtual world design & marketing consultant with New World Consulting. If you’ve spent the last few days wondering and worrying if artificial intelligence really is going to kill us all, I highly, highly recommend this short new talk by Jaron Lanier. While you probably know Jaron as a leading pioneer of virtual reality, he’s also been a top scientist at Microsoft for the last 20 years. So he’s eminently qualified to speak about the current state of AI, and how to reform it. And what he says is profoundly different from what people at companies like Open AI and Anthropic carelessly assert. Among the key points he makes:
- There are relatively simple ways of regulating LLMs to remove their most dangerous potentials for abuse.
- Much or most of the AI industry in the US is consumed by a pseudo-religious belief that they really are creating a god-like form of new life. (And yes, I can confirm many AI advocates have that cultish level of zeal.)
- The Chinese are “beating” the US in the AI race in part because they’re not encumbered by the uniquely Silicon Valley-esque notion that AI should be “godlike”. (I’ve heard the very same thing from people who’ve worked in the Chinese tech industry — they think AGI is a wacky sci-fi notion.) Hope you watch and consider sharing!