Edward Snowden Mocks AI Pessimists: 'Your Printer Doesn't Work' And Google Can't Find Taco Bell, Yet You're Worried About Extermination
Edward Snowden, a former U.S. Intelligence agent turned whistleblower, on Wednesday made fun of AI doomers saying how the current technologies aren't even doing what they are supposed to.
What Happened: Snowden took to X, formerly Twitter, and said that printer malfunction and Alphabet Inc.'s Google fails to provide accurate direction to Taco Bell. Yet, people are worried about the prospect of AI causing the extinction of humanity.
This isn't the first time the former CIA contractor has expressed his views against people saying AI technology could one day be apocalyptic.
In February earlier this year, he said that software engineers involved in pioneering technologies such as AI are being "henpecked" by the aggressive and uninformed pressure of an ignorant agenda.
“People should spend more time agitating against drone swarms and military robots—which are already killing people—than they do trying to cripple LLM chatbots and diffusion models,” he said at the time.
His comments stemmed from Google Gemini controversy, after the tech giant's AI chatbot was caught generating irrelevant and "biased" images for certain prompts.
Why It's Important: In May last year, a survey conducted by Ipsos, suggested that 61% of the American population believe that the fast-paced growth of AI could endanger humanity. Similarly, more than two-third people expressed their concerns over the technology's potential negative impacts.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who co-founded ChatGPT-parent OpenAI in 2015 and left the company in 2018, has also expressed similar sentiments.
Meanwhile, ex-Google executive, Geoffrey Hinton, who is described as the “godfather” of deep learning, also stated that risks posed by AI to humanity could be more pressing than those of climate change.
On the other hand, Meta's chief AI scientist and one of the godfathers of AI, Yann LeCun has been vocal about his stance on AI doomsday theories. He previously said that the concerns about AI taking over are overblown.
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