Scottish professor calls for revolution against tech billionaires | The ...
Shannon Vallor is leading a campaign for ordinary people to take power back from the giant tech corporations controlling our lives. She talks to our Writer at Large
FROM her Edinburgh University office, Professor Shannon Vallor is planning a revolution. She’s coming for the Tech Bros: the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs.
Her battleground is artificial intelligence. Vallor wants us –ordinary people – to wrest back control of AI, perhaps the most important technology on Earth today, from mega-corporations like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
The Fight for Control
The fight is so important to humanity’s future that Vallor equates it with the 20th century’s anti-colonial campaigns and the suffragettes’ struggle for voting rights.
Vallor is one of the world’s most distinguished AI ethicists. She is professor in the ethics of data and artificial intelligence, and a director at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Big tech should fear her. She was once Google’s AI ethicist, so knows these giant corporations intimately.
If big tech is allowed to dominate AI, humanity is in trouble, Vallor believes. We’ll cede control of our lives to corporations which only care about profit and power.
Remaking Our Image of AI
BEFORE we can tame big tech, we need to understand exactly what AI is, Vallor believes. Most of us just buy into claims by the likes of Elon Musk.
We have been led to believe that AI can interact with us in very humanlike ways, that it’s a digital mind. “But what we’re interacting with isn’t another mind at all, it’s a mirror,” Vallor says.
AI isn’t “thinking”. What AI does, Vallor explains, is simply reflect us back to ourselves. AI like ChatGPT just swallows up everything it can online – books, newspaper articles, message board postings, information about our consumption patterns, and financial transactions – and spits it back at us.
The Illusion of Power and Control
Vallor says that given “the world is so overwhelming right now” – and many feel crises like war, climate change, political polarisation and economic chaos are impossible to cope with – there’s the temptation to “just say let machines take care of it. But that’s such a dangerous move. Once we do that, we lose the ability to chart our own course”.
Again, that plays into the hands of tech billionaires – it gives them all the power. “What’s being human other than having the power to decide for yourself what you think?” Vallor asks.
Rethinking the Future of AI
VALLOR says there is quasi-religious fervour within Silicon Valley towards AI, a “saviour complex. It has all the dangers many religious movements have”.
To harness AI’s positive power, we must move away from those “large language models” – like ChatGPT, based on all that biased garbage scraped from the internet. Instead, says Vallor, think of an AI based on large data sets of human tissue samples, and used to reduce cancer diagnosis from weeks to hours.
