Futurists concerned that we are gliding into an AI-fueled dystopia wherein the human race acquiesces its ethical, decision-making, and intellectual powers to a gaggle of corporate algorithms need look no further than Ulf Kristersson to justify their fears.
Kristersson, who happens to be the prime minister of Sweden, recently admitted during a Nordic news site that he sometimes asks ChatGPT for a “second opinion” when it comes to his governance strategies.
“I use it myself quite often,” Kristersson said during the interview. “If for nothing else than for a second opinion. What have others done? And should we think the complete opposite? Those types of questions.”
Predictably, Kristersson was immediately dragged for his comments. “The more he relies on AI for simple things, the bigger the risk of overconfidence in the system,” Virginia Dignum, a professor of responsible artificial intelligence at Umeå University, said while chatting with the same outlet that interviewed the PM. “It is a slippery slope. We must demand that reliability can be guaranteed. We didn’t vote for ChatGPT.”
The PM was also criticized by a variety of other outlets, all of whom seemed to feel that governance via chatbot was not the ideal route for Western civilization. “Too bad for Sweden that AI mostly guesses,” wrote Aftonbladet’s Signe Krantz. “Chatbots would rather write what they think you want than what you need to hear.”
Krantz makes a good point, which is that chatbots can be incredibly sycophantic and delusional. If you have a leader asking a chatbot leading questions, you can imagine a scenario in which the software program’s algorithms only serve to reinforce that leader’s existing prerogatives (or to push them further over the edge into uncharted territory). Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot of politicians feel the need to use ChatGPT as a consigliere yet.
Whether Kristersson really relies on a chatbot while navigating his leadership duties or whether he was, in reality, just trying to seem hip by namedropping a popular tech product during an interview, it’s clear that AI is increasingly being used by all sorts of people to outsource intellectual capacities that, only a few years ago, were exclusively the domain of the human mind. That’s a dangerous situation to be in, as the tech industry has already been atrophying our ability to think for two decades now. How much stupider can we all get? I suppose we’re all about to find out.
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