Anthropic, maker of Claude.ai proposed this week that the industry should have the option to slow or pause frontier development. And their CEO Dario Amodei said in a The New York Times interview in February: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’.
Yet given the competitive pressures at play, I believe the onrush of AI, its evolution from dumb agents and helpful tools into something else entirely, is now inevitable. Anyone who believes we can simply close the hatch on the box we’ve opened, constrain it with a #zerothlaw, or permanently cage it inside narrow #agenticai boundaries is displaying a profound naivety.
And if AI would be (even just potentially) conscious, are cages and containment even ethical? Or just a reflection of (our) fears?
The real question is no longer whether we can stop it, but how we steer it. And that quickly becomes a debate not about technology, but about power: steer toward what, according to whose values, and under whose authority? Elon Musk? The Chinese government? U.S. industry? Which ethics? Which rules?
Who decides? And what do you think?
Food for Thought
Comments welcome!