A clock ticking down to midnight is a once-powerful and now stale metaphor from the atomic age.
Its an image so old and stayed that it just celebrated its 75th anniversary.
Their project has been to warn the world of its impending destruction.
© Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
The Doomsday Clock is one of the ways they do it.
Then they set the clock.
The closer to midnight, the closer humanity is to its doom.
Right now its at90 seconds to midnight, the closest the clock has ever been set.
Wades creation is the AI Safety Clock.
Silicon Valleys loudest AI proponents love to lean into the nuclear metaphor.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman compared the work of his company to the Manhattan Project.
Some of this fear and concern might be genuine but its all marketing at the end of the day.
Were in the middle of a hype cycle around AI.
Companies are promising it can deliver unprecedented returns and destroy labor costs.
Machines, they say, will soon do everything for us.
The fear of AI becoming so advanced that it wipes humanity out is just another kind of hype.
Humans use the tech to flood the internet with non-consensually created nude images of other humans.
These are just a few of the real-world harms already triggered by Silicons rapid embrace of AI.
It also stressed that talk of extreme scenarios around AI helps people avoid having more difficult conversations.
There are dozens of articles like this published every year by the people who trigger the Doomsday Clock.
What it has, instead, is money from Saudi Arabia.
Wades position at the school is possiblethanks to fundingfrom TONOMUS, a subsidiary of NEOM.
NEOM is Saudi Arabias much-hyped city of the future that its attempting to build in the desert.
Among the other promises of NEOM arerobot dinosaurs, flying cars, and a giant artificial moon.
Youll forgive me if I dont take Wade or the AI Safety Clock seriously.
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