Halloween

A growing number of AI models can be put to purposes their designers didn’t envision. Does that include heinous deeds?

The new remote administrative assistant is a little too perky, hardworking, and efficient. Is it because he’s a bot?

Companies are using AI to screen and even interview job applicants. What happens when out-of-control algorithms are the human resources department?

Advanced AI requires advanced hardware. What if the global supply of high-end AI chips dries up? Most of the world’s advanced AI processors are manufactured in Taiwan, where tension with mainland China is rising.

AI researchers are starting to see ghosts in their machines. Are they hallucinations, or does a dawning consciousness haunt the trained weights?

Is human creativity being replaced by the synthetic equivalent? The fear: AI is cranking out increasingly sophisticated visual, musical, and literary works. AI-generated media will flood the market, squeezing out human artists and depriving the world of their creativity.

What if AI-enabled monitoring isn’t just for dictators and despots?The fear: Under the pretext of maintaining law and order, even countries founded on a commitment to individual rights allow police to take advantage of smart-city infrastructure and smart-home devices.

Is AI becoming inbred? The fear: The best models increasingly are fine-tuned versions of a small number of so-called foundation models that were pretrained on immense quantities of data scraped from the web.

War is already bad enough. What happens when human combatants are replaced by machines?

Tech companies generally try to be (or to appear to be) socially responsible. Would some rather let AI’s negative impacts slide?

Will we ever understand what goes on inside the mind of a neural network?The fear: When AI systems go wrong, no one will be able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions.

Will AI that discriminates based on race, gender, or economic status undermine the public’s confidence in the technology? Seduced by the promise of cost savings and data-driven decision making, organizations will deploy biased systems that end up doing real-world damage.

What if AI requires so much computation that it becomes unaffordable?The fear: Training ever more capable models will become too pricey for all but the richest corporations and government agencies. Rising costs will

Will international rivalries fragment international cooperation in machine learning? Countries competing for AI dominance will lash out at competitors.

Will AI promote lies that deepen social divisions? Propagandists will bait online recommendation algorithms with sensationalized falsehoods. People who snap at the clickbait will be reeled into opposing ideological silos.