True self-driving car technology (i.e. autopilot) isn’t hard. There are chips out there that can view scenes in real time, systems that can follow a line in the middle of the road, other scanners that can look for stray dogs or kids wandering into the street. They could be accident-free 99% of the time or more.
But think about what you just read. Ninety-nine percent uptime means that once every 100 hours, someone’s car will veer off the road. Once every 100 hours a self-driving car will ignore a pedestrian. Once every 100 hours someone will be driving a sleek, climate-controlled weapon of destruction.
And that’s in the fairly closed problem of mobility. Imagine an AI system with 99% uptime that ran medical test analysis. Or another system that watched over a nuclear power plant, replacing human beings. Or an AI system that you use to write a press release every few days.
While not all of those AI problems are the same, when we depend on AI it will become as important as the internet and it must be as bulletproof. Interestingly, that is not currently the case.
Check out this Tweet:
Right now AI doesn’t even need an 50% uptime. A lot of us could take or leave it, assuming rightly that if we can’t get DALL-E to draw our jetpack kitten image we can find one elsewhere.
But eventually AI will be vital. We know, for example, that all of the complexity required to run a fleet of driverless trucks won’t be hanging out on board the trucks. They’ll be communicating, trading information, planning routes, all autonomously. What happens when the model that runs those trucks fails, when the power goes out. We have just injected the digital into the real world and we could easily face a disaster of unimaginable proportions.
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So right now ChatGPT going down is kind of funny. In a year it will be kind of scary. In a five years it will be catastrophic. Who gets the blame with that medical analysis system fails? Or when an AI-powered school crashes? Or when your own intelligent agent stops answering your important questions?
ChatGPT going down today is fine. ChatGPT going down tomorrow? Maybe not so much.
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