Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak didn’t hold back when he described the most ambitious figures in the AI race as the “lunatic fringe” of Silicon Valley. The piece suggested that the iPhone maker is hoping to position itself as being on the right side of a growing AI backlash.
Given the pace of development, trying to predict the future of AI is a risky business, but I do think Apple is absolutely right about the dangers …
The piece cites the familiar refrain that Apple’s slow pace when it comes to AI features could see the company being left behind.
Virtually [all other tech giants] have flung themselves into the AI arms race, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into training ever more intelligent thinking machines. While Apple trains its own models, it is nowhere near the technology’s frontier, leaving the company vulnerable to being left behind if super-smart AI transforms industry and society in the coming years.
Joswiak counters that the company is focused on launching AI features that will perform useful tasks for ordinary people, and that Apple’s privacy focus will become increasingly valuable in the context of an AI backlash against a “lunatic fringe” of unconstrained acceleration of a technology we can barely control today.
Lunacy is certainly a good word to describe a world in which AI companies fear that their work may destroy humanity, but they are even more afraid that one of their competitors will beat them to it.
AI is the first technological development that has ever threatened such a wide variety of jobs, with a huge number of positions likely to be eliminated in fields as diverse as truck driving, marketing, and software development. Academics have even expressed concern that future generations will no longer become mathematicians or scientific researchers over fears that those roles will be made redundant by AI.
For example, math professor Giordano Scarciotti recently said that when AI models are solving in days problems academics have worked on for years, the results could be devastating because it will seem pointless to future generations to even attempt this type of work.
I explore a potentially devastating consequence of AI’s growing capabilities: what happens when the next generation of talented students no longer sees a reason to become mathematicians? The implications could extend far beyond mathematics and affect the future of scientific progress itself.
He argues that when today’s students see no future in academic research, this may leave AI models technically solving scientific problems, but with no one left to understand the implications and to apply the findings in meaningful ways. Similar effects are likely to occur in software development, where there are fewer and fewer humans able to understand the code being generated by increasingly advanced AI models.
The nightmare scenario here is that AI takes on ever more tasks as once-expert human beings become sidelined and marginalized because there’s no point in future generations attempting to compete. And if you think that’s baseless paranoia, I highly recommend listening to the podcast series Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse.
Quite how much power Apple has to fight back against such a dystopian future is questionable, but it could certainly be argued that at least the company is not applying its vast resources to accelerating the effect. Here’s hoping that the AI backlash grows sufficiently rapidly and loudly that politicians are forced to take steps to bring the current wild west of AI under some form of control.
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Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!
