Tristan Harris — formerly a “Design Ethicist” at Google — and Aza Raskin drilled their 2021 documentary The Social Dilemma (film website, see trailer here) for the myriad of problems posed by the development and deployment of AI systems are thrown up.
Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world.
If the “social dilemma” was still about polarization, ever-shortening attention spans and cascades of outrage on social media platforms, this time the keywords are the same: collapse of perceived reality, fully automated hacker attacks, synthetic emotional ties, automated lobbying or even the collapse of the legal system. And all of this not because AI systems are beginning to transform us all into paperclips, but above all because AI systems are the first non-human entities that can produce language that appears natural and are therefore a psychological gateway to our society for algorithms and automation and create social mechanisms.
In another lecture they discussed these topics a few days ago: Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss The AI Dilemma.