Happy Sunday and welcome to InsideAI Weekend! I'm Rob May, Founder and CTO at Dianthus. I'm also a venture partner at PJC and an active angel investor so, if you have an early stage AI company looking for investment, please reach out.
This week, the thing that most caught my eye was this article about how easy it was for an AI to generate new ideas for chemical weapons. This is the downside of tech's obsession with "lowering the friction" to doing something - while it democratizes it in some beneficial ways, it also makes it easier for nefarious actions.
Blogging lowered the friction to publishing online. The plus side was anyone with a point of view could now have a platform, and some undiscovered stars finally became well known. The down side was spam and misinformation ran rampant, and anyone with an agenda could create something that looked like a real news source.
Social media lowered the friction to building an maintaining connections. The plus side is that it became easier than ever to keep up with old friends and distant family members. The downside is we constantly see everything that everyone does, are pushed to compare ourselves, and take every picture not for ourselves and our memories, but to shape how others perceive us and our lives.
Now AI comes along and lowers the barrier to solving problems. On the plus side we can easily create videos, or discover new drugs. On the downside, we get deepfakes and we can easily discover new chemical weapons.
It's a scary future and most of the tech industry is optimistic by nature. I'd argue given our track record of causing as much harm as we do good, we should be very careful and thoughtful about how we proceed with these AI technologies.
Thanks for reading.
@robmay
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