Remarks on AI from NZ – By Neal Stephenson

Last week I participated in a panel discussion on AI as part of a private event in New Zealand. The organizers asked me to kick it off by talking for ten minutes, so I pulled together a few ideas on the topic, which I’m going to present in lightly edited form here. The organizers specifically wanted to think in big-picture terms so as to avoid getting fixated on rapidly changing current events, and I think that this reflects that. The objective was to get participants thinking and talking, so I tried to present one or two notions that might be thought-provoking rather than trying to make some kind of heavy ex cathedra statement—which I’m not really qualified to do anyway.

The event was held under the Chatham House Rule, so I’m free to repeat what I said but not to divulge the identities of other participants or to repeat what they said.

The Opening Remarks

For the average person, AI is synonymous with large language models that have become available in the last couple of years through easy-to-use prompt-based interfaces. These have given non-technical users the ability to generate texts, images, and even movies that would have been beyond their reach before. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they’d have had to actually learn how to write, paint, or direct films in order to produce anything of the kind. I see parallels between these and the hydrogen bomb tests that were conducted in your 1 back yard during the 1950s. The advent of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki came as a complete surprise to the average person. In fact, though, the neutron had been discovered in 1932 and work had been underway for decades to learn more about nuclear processes and find useful applications, some of which had already become available. The eruption onto the scene of nuclear bombs suddenly focused the world’s attention on this hitherto obscure scientific discipline and made physicists into important people with weighty responsibilities. The arms race that followed, in…