Fragments
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947):
Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them.
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Robert Oppenheimer, Hearing Before Personnel Security Board (1954):
It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.
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Bill Joy, ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’ (2000):
We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. Have we already gone too far down the path to alter course? I don't believe so, but we aren't trying yet, and the last chance to assert control—the fail-safe point—is rapidly approaching.
The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions.
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Victoria Krakovna, ‘Risks from general artificial intelligence without an intelligence explosion’ (2015):
Researchers, companies and governments have professional and economic incentives to build AI that is as powerful as possible, as quickly as possible.
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Ezra Klein, ‘This Changes Everything’ (2023):
We can plan for what we can predict (though it is telling that, for the most part, we haven’t). What’s coming will be weirder. I use that term here in a specific way. In his book “High Weirdness,” Erik Davis, the historian of Californian counterculture, describes weird things as “anomalous — they deviate from the norms of informed expectation and challenge established explanations, sometimes quite radically.” That is the world we’re building.
I cannot emphasize this enough: We do not understand these systems, and it’s not clear we even can.
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Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, ‘ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution’ (2023):
AI’s capacities are not static but expand exponentially as the technology advances. Recently, the complexity of AI models has been doubling every few months. Therefore generative AI systems have capabilities that remain undisclosed even to their inventors. With each new AI system, they are building new capacities without understanding their origin or destination. As a result, our future now holds an entirely novel element of mystery, risk and surprise.
Enlightenment science accumulated certainties; the new AI generates cumulative ambiguities.
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Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926):
When an affair has been under consideration for a very long time, and even before assessment of it is complete, it can happen that something occurs to settle it, like a sudden flash of lightning at some unforeseeable point, and you can’t pinpoint it later. The case is thus brought to an arbitrary, if usually quite correct, conclusion. It’s as if the official mechanism could no longer stand up to the tension and the years of attrition caused by the same factor, which in itself may be slight, and has made the decision of its own accord with no need for the officials to take a hand. Of course there has not been any miracle, and certainly some official or other made a note of the matter concluding the case, or came to an unwritten decision, but at least we here can’t find out, even from the authority, which official made the decision in this case and why. The supervisory authorities will discover that much later, but we ourselves never do, and by then hardly anyone would be interested. Well, as I was saying, these decisions are generally excellent, and the only disruptive aspect of them is that, as it usually turns out, we learn about them too late…