Christopher Nolan Says AI Dangers Have Been ‘Apparent for Years,’ Press Covered It More Once Chatbots Threatened Their Jobs: ‘Suddenly It’s a Crisis’

variety.com:

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Christopher Nolan got honest about artificial intelligence in a new interview with Wired magazine.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker says the writing has been on the wall about AI dangers for quite some time, but now the media is more focused on the technology because it poses a threat to their jobs. “The growth of AI in terms of weapons systems and the problems that it is going to create have been very apparent for a lot of years,” Nolan said. “Few journalists bothered to write about it.

Now that there’s a chatbot that can write an article for a local newspaper, suddenly it’s a crisis.” Nolan said the main issue with AI is “a very simple one” and relates to the technology being used by companies to “evade responsibility for their actions.” “If we endorse the view that AI is all-powerful, we are endorsing the view that it can alleviate people of responsibility for their actions—militarily, socio­economically, whatever,” Nolan continued. “The biggest danger of AI is that we attribute these godlike characteristics to it and therefore let ourselves off the hook.

I don’t know what the mythological underpinnings of this are, but throughout history there’s this tendency of human beings to create false idols, to mold something in our own image and then say we’ve got godlike powers because we did that.” Nolan added that he feels there is “a real danger” with AI, saying, “I identify the danger as the abdication of responsibility.” “I feel that AI can still be a very powerful tool for us.