From promise to peril: Is AI becoming our modern Frankenstein?

If, in human imagination or perception, God, among other things, is also quintessentially the supreme force that could make or break your life, then AI can probably also be put in this league today. Its acolytes (those at the forefront of advancing it) have already designated it as the new god, who will help in shaping a new world and a new future for what it will have, including humans. For obvious reasons, they are focusing on its possible benevolent gifts.

But, in opposition to it, a new brigade has suddenly emerged, saying that AI would ultimately end up as the new age version of Frankenstein’s monster, capable of destroying its own creator. And some of the prominent faces of this anti-AI brigade are those who were on the other side of the divide till recently. And that’s why the apprehension expressed by them is appearing to be more credible.  “Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” wrote Jacob Coxon in his resignation letter, when he recently quit his senior researcher’s job at Anthropic. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight and acquire real power and resources”. His exit has reignited the debate about the other side of possibilities, which AI can deliver in a purely malevolent manner.

Coxon is not alone. Now, Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic, has also pleaded for slowing down AI development and he has found support from the likes of OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Quite interestingly, Pope Leo XIV had recently also joined this chorus, saying AI could threaten human dignity and jobs and needs to be controlled with stringent rules. Much before this, last year, Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel laureate for his pioneering work in artificial neural networks, who is described as ‘Godfather of AI’) had suggested imbuing maternal instincts in AI models, particularly driving robots. This way, they will not look at humans as rivals and will become protective of them.  

All this appears to be taken straight from a popular science fiction flick (remember robots attacking humans in the Terminator series?). But, considering the growing pitch of the anti-AI voices, such threats seem to be increasingly becoming more real. There have been incidents of robots attacking human supervisors on the assembly floors in China and elsewhere.

The moot point is much bigger. Are we digging our own graves by handing over the reins of command of human life to machines who, at a very advanced stage, may become independent and uncontrollable entities? Should the greed of a few enterprises to replace a bulk of human activities with machine-led systems developed by them be allowed to go scot-free? These existential points are too grave to be ignored.

Let us be clear. Human societies since the advent of the Industrial Revolution have moved at a brisk pace. And after World War II, the real tech age has arrived, which has given tremendous acceleration to changes and progress around us. But does it make sense to equate AI with invention and mass-scale adoption of something like computers, which completely changed the way we work? Those supporting the argument that AI should be pushed at a great speed often cite this example – there were protests in many countries in the 1970s and ’80s as the companies began buying computers for their usual work.

It could be a completely erroneous way of looking at the issue at hand. A defining device like a computer had made inroads and was embraced when the economies around the world were growing, and the human population was nearly half of what it is today. It never threatened the role and presence of humans in services and industrial sectors – rather, their role was amplified, as the economic growth hit a new trajectory pushed by factors like globalisation.

But AI is clearly posing an existential threat in many ways – to begin with, to regular jobs in the services and industrial sector management, which have evolved in the last four to five decades. In an overpopulated world, which needs to create more jobs to keep social equilibrium intact, AI, as some experts are emphasising, is indicating delivering something quite the opposite of this. It will carry along a select few, while leaving behind the majority in the lurch. There is no gainsaying that this points to a very potent recipe for disaster. In the same breath, one can’t deny its positive deliverables in helping our systems (economic and social) become more efficient. But then, the other side has also to be examined carefully too (it has to be a collaborative exercise) before we hit the point of no return.