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One in seven HR heads believe men are better suited to top jobs
(and the PATRIARCHAL WAR ON WOMEN continues apace)
?width=620&dpr=1&s=none
Poll indicates younger HR managers are more likely to be prejudiced against women’s capacity to tackle the biggest roles than their older counterparts. Photograph: Aleksandr Davydov/Alamy
One in seven HR heads believe men are better suited to top jobs
‘Shocking’ poll in England and Wales shows nearly one in five reluctant to hire women they think may go on to have children
Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent
Tue 28 Nov 2023 19.01 EST
Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2023 11.13 EST
A significant minority of human resources executives believe men are better suited to senior management than women, according to the results of a “shocking” poll. Nearly one in seven HR decision-makers rate men as better for top jobs and nearly one in five admitted they were reluctant to hire women they thought might go on to start families, the survey of personnel managers in England and Wales for the charity Young Women’s Trust (YWT) found. It said the figures were a “travesty” and showed England and Wales were “living in the dark ages”. British Telecom, ITV and GlaxoSmithKline all operate under female chief executives in the UK, a country that has had more female leaders than Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan combined.
The findings also indicated that younger HR managers were more likely than their older counterparts to be prejudiced against women’s capacity to tackle the biggest roles. “It is shocking that HR managers still believe that men are better suited to senior management than women,” said Alesha De-Freitas, the head of policy at the Fawcett Society, who said the figures showed businesses were systematically and illegally discriminating against women. “This then funnels through to all of women’s experiences at work, from pay discrimination to unfair treatment around contracts. No wonder there is no prospect of the gender pay gap closing for at least another 28 years.”
. . . .
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which represents HR managers, admitted the results of the survey were “concerning” and said they showed “we have much further to go”. “There needs to be a much stronger focus now on increasing the number of women in executive committee roles and their direct reports to build a strong pipeline of female talent for the future,” said Claire McCartney, the senior inclusion and resourcing adviser for the CIPD, which also called for continuing education of decision-makers “on the importance of gender equality at every level and take active steps to address gender stereotypes and biases head-on”.
Young Women’s Trust also polled 4,000 young women and found almost one in four have been paid less than young men for the same work. Half are worried about not having enough opportunities to progress and 28% of HR decision-makers agreed that it was harder for women to progress in their organisation than men. The Department for Business and Trade, which is led by Kemi Badenoch, who is also the minister for women and equalities, declined to comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/29/hr-heads-poll-men-women-top-jobs-england-wales
One in seven HR heads believe men are better suited to top jobs
(and the PATRIARCHAL WAR ON WOMEN continues apace)
?width=620&dpr=1&s=none
Poll indicates younger HR managers are more likely to be prejudiced against women’s capacity to tackle the biggest roles than their older counterparts. Photograph: Aleksandr Davydov/Alamy
One in seven HR heads believe men are better suited to top jobs
‘Shocking’ poll in England and Wales shows nearly one in five reluctant to hire women they think may go on to have children
Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent
Tue 28 Nov 2023 19.01 EST
Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2023 11.13 EST
A significant minority of human resources executives believe men are better suited to senior management than women, according to the results of a “shocking” poll. Nearly one in seven HR decision-makers rate men as better for top jobs and nearly one in five admitted they were reluctant to hire women they thought might go on to start families, the survey of personnel managers in England and Wales for the charity Young Women’s Trust (YWT) found. It said the figures were a “travesty” and showed England and Wales were “living in the dark ages”. British Telecom, ITV and GlaxoSmithKline all operate under female chief executives in the UK, a country that has had more female leaders than Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan combined.
The findings also indicated that younger HR managers were more likely than their older counterparts to be prejudiced against women’s capacity to tackle the biggest roles. “It is shocking that HR managers still believe that men are better suited to senior management than women,” said Alesha De-Freitas, the head of policy at the Fawcett Society, who said the figures showed businesses were systematically and illegally discriminating against women. “This then funnels through to all of women’s experiences at work, from pay discrimination to unfair treatment around contracts. No wonder there is no prospect of the gender pay gap closing for at least another 28 years.”
. . . .
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which represents HR managers, admitted the results of the survey were “concerning” and said they showed “we have much further to go”. “There needs to be a much stronger focus now on increasing the number of women in executive committee roles and their direct reports to build a strong pipeline of female talent for the future,” said Claire McCartney, the senior inclusion and resourcing adviser for the CIPD, which also called for continuing education of decision-makers “on the importance of gender equality at every level and take active steps to address gender stereotypes and biases head-on”.
Young Women’s Trust also polled 4,000 young women and found almost one in four have been paid less than young men for the same work. Half are worried about not having enough opportunities to progress and 28% of HR decision-makers agreed that it was harder for women to progress in their organisation than men. The Department for Business and Trade, which is led by Kemi Badenoch, who is also the minister for women and equalities, declined to comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/29/hr-heads-poll-men-women-top-jobs-england-wales
One in seven HR heads believe men are better suited to top jobs
(and the PATRIARCHAL WAR ON WOMEN continues apace)
?width=620&dpr=1&s=none
Poll indicates younger HR managers are more likely to be prejudiced against women’s capacity to tackle the biggest roles than their older counterparts. Photograph: Aleksandr Davydov/Alamy
One in seven HR heads believe men are better suited to top jobs
‘Shocking’ poll in England and Wales shows nearly one in five reluctant to hire women they think may go on to have children
Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent
Tue 28 Nov 2023 19.01 EST
Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2023 11.13 EST
A significant minority of human resources executives believe men are better suited to senior management than women, according to the results of a “shocking” poll. Nearly one in seven HR decision-makers rate men as better for top jobs and nearly one in five admitted they were reluctant to hire women they thought might go on to start families, the survey of personnel managers in England and Wales for the charity Young Women’s Trust (YWT) found. It said the figures were a “travesty” and showed England and Wales were “living in the dark ages”. British Telecom, ITV and GlaxoSmithKline all operate under female chief executives in the UK, a country that has had more female leaders than Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan combined.
The findings also indicated that younger HR managers were more likely than their older counterparts to be prejudiced against women’s capacity to tackle the biggest roles. “It is shocking that HR managers still believe that men are better suited to senior management than women,” said Alesha De-Freitas, the head of policy at the Fawcett Society, who said the figures showed businesses were systematically and illegally discriminating against women. “This then funnels through to all of women’s experiences at work, from pay discrimination to unfair treatment around contracts. No wonder there is no prospect of the gender pay gap closing for at least another 28 years.”
. . . .
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which represents HR managers, admitted the results of the survey were “concerning” and said they showed “we have much further to go”. “There needs to be a much stronger focus now on increasing the number of women in executive committee roles and their direct reports to build a strong pipeline of female talent for the future,” said Claire McCartney, the senior inclusion and resourcing adviser for the CIPD, which also called for continuing education of decision-makers “on the importance of gender equality at every level and take active steps to address gender stereotypes and biases head-on”.
Young Women’s Trust also polled 4,000 young women and found almost one in four have been paid less than young men for the same work. Half are worried about not having enough opportunities to progress and 28% of HR decision-makers agreed that it was harder for women to progress in their organisation than men. The Department for Business and Trade, which is led by Kemi Badenoch, who is also the minister for women and equalities, declined to comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/29/hr-heads-poll-men-women-top-jobs-england-wales
One in seven HR heads believe men are better suited to top jobs
(and the PATRIARCHAL WAR ON WOMEN continues apace)
?width=620&dpr=1&s=none
Poll indicates younger HR managers are more likely to be prejudiced against women’s capacity to tackle the biggest roles than their older counterparts. Photograph: Aleksandr Davydov/Alamy
One in seven HR heads believe men are better suited to top jobs
‘Shocking’ poll in England and Wales shows nearly one in five reluctant to hire women they think may go on to have children
Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent
Tue 28 Nov 2023 19.01 EST
Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2023 11.13 EST
A significant minority of human resources executives believe men are better suited to senior management than women, according to the results of a “shocking” poll. Nearly one in seven HR decision-makers rate men as better for top jobs and nearly one in five admitted they were reluctant to hire women they thought might go on to start families, the survey of personnel managers in England and Wales for the charity Young Women’s Trust (YWT) found. It said the figures were a “travesty” and showed England and Wales were “living in the dark ages”. British Telecom, ITV and GlaxoSmithKline all operate under female chief executives in the UK, a country that has had more female leaders than Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan combined.
The findings also indicated that younger HR managers were more likely than their older counterparts to be prejudiced against women’s capacity to tackle the biggest roles. “It is shocking that HR managers still believe that men are better suited to senior management than women,” said Alesha De-Freitas, the head of policy at the Fawcett Society, who said the figures showed businesses were systematically and illegally discriminating against women. “This then funnels through to all of women’s experiences at work, from pay discrimination to unfair treatment around contracts. No wonder there is no prospect of the gender pay gap closing for at least another 28 years.”
. . . .
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which represents HR managers, admitted the results of the survey were “concerning” and said they showed “we have much further to go”. “There needs to be a much stronger focus now on increasing the number of women in executive committee roles and their direct reports to build a strong pipeline of female talent for the future,” said Claire McCartney, the senior inclusion and resourcing adviser for the CIPD, which also called for continuing education of decision-makers “on the importance of gender equality at every level and take active steps to address gender stereotypes and biases head-on”.
Young Women’s Trust also polled 4,000 young women and found almost one in four have been paid less than young men for the same work. Half are worried about not having enough opportunities to progress and 28% of HR decision-makers agreed that it was harder for women to progress in their organisation than men. The Department for Business and Trade, which is led by Kemi Badenoch, who is also the minister for women and equalities, declined to comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/29/hr-heads-poll-men-women-top-jobs-england-wales
Where are all the 'godmothers' of AI? Women's voices are not being heard
Where are all the ‘godmothers’ of AI? Women’s voices are not being heard
Luba Kassova
Amid the coverage of Sam Altman returning to the helm of OpenAI, women are being written out of the future of AI
Sat 25 Nov 2023 04.00 EST
Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2023 07.40 EST
?width=620&dpr=1&s=none
‘We are heading toward the best world ever,” said Sam Altman in an interview earlier this month, just before the saga of his firing and rehiring as OpenAI’s chief executive. As an expert on gender equity in news, this statement made me wonder: whose world was heading towards being the best ever? As it turns out, the one the Altman team is crafting is largely devoid of women. My analysis amid the furore around his dismissal revealed fascinating insights: for example, of the 702 (out of 750) employees who signed the letter demanding Altman’s reinstatement more than 75% were men, a gender imbalance that matches that identified in AI teams in McKinsey’s The State of AI in 2022 report. After Altman’s return, OpenAI’s newly established board of directors is now made up exclusively of white men, a situation compounded by male dominance among executives. Where are the voices of female AI leaders and experts in coverage of this most dramatic of Silicon Valley stories?
Women’s role in crafting our AI-infused future and shaping the news around generative AI has concerned me for some time. From analysing data and conversations with experts, I realise that, whether as developers, news editors or AI experts, women are largely absent from the AI world. Generative AI (GAI) relies on processing vast datasets of text, images and video, all of which have featured overwhelmingly more men than women in the past. This inherited male bias, mirrored in the news, combined with the structural gaps women face in society today, results in a narrative about GAI’s risks, limitations, opportunities and direction shaped primarily by men. AKAS’s pronoun analysis of GDELT Project’s global online news database shows that so far this year men have been quoted 3.7 times more frequently than women in news about AI in English-speaking nations. According to the most recent Global Media Monitoring Project results, only 4% of news stories focusing on science, technology, funding discoveries and developments centred around women. An assessment by AKAS of tech news editors in April shows that in Britain and the US only 18% and 23% respectively were female. Men are between three and five times more likely than women to be deciding what constitutes a technology story.
. . .
Given women’s peripheral presence in the AI industry and muted voice in news, their concerns are unlikely to be captured, let alone addressed in future developments.Leslie McIntosh, vice-president of research integrity at Digital Science, says: “If your perspective is not reported, you are not in the story. GAI takes those historical texts and is building and projecting our future. So where women’s missing voices were once crevices, they have now become large gaps. Nicholas Diakopoulos, professor in communication studies at Northwestern University in Chicago, says: “Disparities in representation of race, gender or different occupations [in generative AI models] are important, since if the media uses these kinds of models uncritically to illustrate stories, they could easily perpetuate biases embedded in the training data of the models.”
?width=620&dpr=1&s=none
Tasha McCauley in 2014. She has just been ousted from OpenAI’s board along with Helen Toner. Photograph: Jerod Harris/Getty
. . . .
What can be done to ensure that concerns voiced by women such as Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley (both now ousted from OpenAI’s board), or those of the women on the fringes of the AI industry, are not squandered? While there is much debate about the effectiveness of the “guard rails” (coding aimed at correcting data biases), I detected a consensus among the experts I spoke with: AI itself can remedy the diversity deficit. “What gets measured, gets managed,” says Lars Damgaard Nielsen, Mediacatch.io’s chief executive, and a proponent of using AI to track gender and ethnic bias in the media. He and other experts argue that an effective way of correcting male bias would be to use AI to measure women’s share of presence within the discourse, flagging to us humans the vital need to seek the perspectives of all genders, groups and cultures on one of the century’s most far-reaching stories.
Luba Kassova is the author of the Missing Perspectives of Women series of reports and co-founder of international audience strategy consultancy AKAS.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/nov/25/where-are-godmothers-of-ai-womens-voices-not-heard-in-tech-sam-altman-openai
Where are all the 'godmothers' of AI? Women's voices are not being heard
Where are all the ‘godmothers’ of AI? Women’s voices are not being heard
Luba Kassova
Amid the coverage of Sam Altman returning to the helm of OpenAI, women are being written out of the future of AI
Sat 25 Nov 2023 04.00 EST
Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2023 07.40 EST
?width=620&dpr=1&s=none
‘We are heading toward the best world ever,” said Sam Altman in an interview earlier this month, just before the saga of his firing and rehiring as OpenAI’s chief executive. As an expert on gender equity in news, this statement made me wonder: whose world was heading towards being the best ever? As it turns out, the one the Altman team is crafting is largely devoid of women. My analysis amid the furore around his dismissal revealed fascinating insights: for example, of the 702 (out of 750) employees who signed the letter demanding Altman’s reinstatement more than 75% were men, a gender imbalance that matches that identified in AI teams in McKinsey’s The State of AI in 2022 report. After Altman’s return, OpenAI’s newly established board of directors is now made up exclusively of white men, a situation compounded by male dominance among executives. Where are the voices of female AI leaders and experts in coverage of this most dramatic of Silicon Valley stories?
Women’s role in crafting our AI-infused future and shaping the news around generative AI has concerned me for some time. From analysing data and conversations with experts, I realise that, whether as developers, news editors or AI experts, women are largely absent from the AI world. Generative AI (GAI) relies on processing vast datasets of text, images and video, all of which have featured overwhelmingly more men than women in the past. This inherited male bias, mirrored in the news, combined with the structural gaps women face in society today, results in a narrative about GAI’s risks, limitations, opportunities and direction shaped primarily by men. AKAS’s pronoun analysis of GDELT Project’s global online news database shows that so far this year men have been quoted 3.7 times more frequently than women in news about AI in English-speaking nations. According to the most recent Global Media Monitoring Project results, only 4% of news stories focusing on science, technology, funding discoveries and developments centred around women. An assessment by AKAS of tech news editors in April shows that in Britain and the US only 18% and 23% respectively were female. Men are between three and five times more likely than women to be deciding what constitutes a technology story.
. . .
Given women’s peripheral presence in the AI industry and muted voice in news, their concerns are unlikely to be captured, let alone addressed in future developments.Leslie McIntosh, vice-president of research integrity at Digital Science, says: “If your perspective is not reported, you are not in the story. GAI takes those historical texts and is building and projecting our future. So where women’s missing voices were once crevices, they have now become large gaps. Nicholas Diakopoulos, professor in communication studies at Northwestern University in Chicago, says: “Disparities in representation of race, gender or different occupations [in generative AI models] are important, since if the media uses these kinds of models uncritically to illustrate stories, they could easily perpetuate biases embedded in the training data of the models.”
?width=620&dpr=1&s=none
Tasha McCauley in 2014. She has just been ousted from OpenAI’s board along with Helen Toner. Photograph: Jerod Harris/Getty
. . . .
What can be done to ensure that concerns voiced by women such as Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley (both now ousted from OpenAI’s board), or those of the women on the fringes of the AI industry, are not squandered? While there is much debate about the effectiveness of the “guard rails” (coding aimed at correcting data biases), I detected a consensus among the experts I spoke with: AI itself can remedy the diversity deficit. “What gets measured, gets managed,” says Lars Damgaard Nielsen, Mediacatch.io’s chief executive, and a proponent of using AI to track gender and ethnic bias in the media. He and other experts argue that an effective way of correcting male bias would be to use AI to measure women’s share of presence within the discourse, flagging to us humans the vital need to seek the perspectives of all genders, groups and cultures on one of the century’s most far-reaching stories.
Luba Kassova is the author of the Missing Perspectives of Women series of reports and co-founder of international audience strategy consultancy AKAS.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/nov/25/where-are-godmothers-of-ai-womens-voices-not-heard-in-tech-sam-altman-openai
Where are all the 'godmothers' of AI? Women's voices are not being heard
Where are all the ‘godmothers’ of AI? Women’s voices are not being heard
Luba Kassova
Amid the coverage of Sam Altman returning to the helm of OpenAI, women are being written out of the future of AI
Sat 25 Nov 2023 04.00 EST
Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2023 07.40 EST
?width=620&dpr=1&s=none
‘We are heading toward the best world ever,” said Sam Altman in an interview earlier this month, just before the saga of his firing and rehiring as OpenAI’s chief executive. As an expert on gender equity in news, this statement made me wonder: whose world was heading towards being the best ever? As it turns out, the one the Altman team is crafting is largely devoid of women. My analysis amid the furore around his dismissal revealed fascinating insights: for example, of the 702 (out of 750) employees who signed the letter demanding Altman’s reinstatement more than 75% were men, a gender imbalance that matches that identified in AI teams in McKinsey’s The State of AI in 2022 report. After Altman’s return, OpenAI’s newly established board of directors is now made up exclusively of white men, a situation compounded by male dominance among executives. Where are the voices of female AI leaders and experts in coverage of this most dramatic of Silicon Valley stories?
Women’s role in crafting our AI-infused future and shaping the news around generative AI has concerned me for some time. From analysing data and conversations with experts, I realise that, whether as developers, news editors or AI experts, women are largely absent from the AI world. Generative AI (GAI) relies on processing vast datasets of text, images and video, all of which have featured overwhelmingly more men than women in the past. This inherited male bias, mirrored in the news, combined with the structural gaps women face in society today, results in a narrative about GAI’s risks, limitations, opportunities and direction shaped primarily by men. AKAS’s pronoun analysis of GDELT Project’s global online news database shows that so far this year men have been quoted 3.7 times more frequently than women in news about AI in English-speaking nations. According to the most recent Global Media Monitoring Project results, only 4% of news stories focusing on science, technology, funding discoveries and developments centred around women. An assessment by AKAS of tech news editors in April shows that in Britain and the US only 18% and 23% respectively were female. Men are between three and five times more likely than women to be deciding what constitutes a technology story.
. . .
Given women’s peripheral presence in the AI industry and muted voice in news, their concerns are unlikely to be captured, let alone addressed in future developments.Leslie McIntosh, vice-president of research integrity at Digital Science, says: “If your perspective is not reported, you are not in the story. GAI takes those historical texts and is building and projecting our future. So where women’s missing voices were once crevices, they have now become large gaps. Nicholas Diakopoulos, professor in communication studies at Northwestern University in Chicago, says: “Disparities in representation of race, gender or different occupations [in generative AI models] are important, since if the media uses these kinds of models uncritically to illustrate stories, they could easily perpetuate biases embedded in the training data of the models.”
?width=620&dpr=1&s=none
Tasha McCauley in 2014. She has just been ousted from OpenAI’s board along with Helen Toner. Photograph: Jerod Harris/Getty
. . . .
What can be done to ensure that concerns voiced by women such as Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley (both now ousted from OpenAI’s board), or those of the women on the fringes of the AI industry, are not squandered? While there is much debate about the effectiveness of the “guard rails” (coding aimed at correcting data biases), I detected a consensus among the experts I spoke with: AI itself can remedy the diversity deficit. “What gets measured, gets managed,” says Lars Damgaard Nielsen, Mediacatch.io’s chief executive, and a proponent of using AI to track gender and ethnic bias in the media. He and other experts argue that an effective way of correcting male bias would be to use AI to measure women’s share of presence within the discourse, flagging to us humans the vital need to seek the perspectives of all genders, groups and cultures on one of the century’s most far-reaching stories.
Luba Kassova is the author of the Missing Perspectives of Women series of reports and co-founder of international audience strategy consultancy AKAS.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/nov/25/where-are-godmothers-of-ai-womens-voices-not-heard-in-tech-sam-altman-openai
You Should Be Terrified of What's Happening With AI
You Should Be Terrified of What’s Happening With AI
11/29/2023 by Jill Filipovic
The Sam Altman OpenAI story is being covered as a Succession-style drama. It’s actually about the future of humanity.
(Nikolas Kokovlis / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
This story originally appeared on Jill.substack.com, a newsletter from journalist, lawyer and author Jill Filipovic.
Last week, the story of Sam Altman leaving OpenAI dominated the U.S. headlines, in part because it was just all so dramatic: A young genius who checks all the Silicon Valley boxes (white guy / prepper / dropped out of Stanford / extremely confident he is changing the world for the better,) who is also widely recognized as the most important person in AI, was unceremoniously pushed out of the AI company he ran, leading to a staff revolt against the board that pushed him out, a soft landing at Microsoft, and then, within days, reinstatement into his old position and a quick reshuffling of the board in which all the women were removed and replaced with men, including Larry “men are better at math than women” Summers. Spicy! But news outlets really did us all a disservice by initially framing this as a Succession-style power struggle rather than what it really is: a battle for the future of humanity. And not just for our jobs, but for our very basic ability to survive as a species.
. . . .
AI may very well make our lives easier. It will almost certainly put any of us out of work. But it may also leave us adrift—without obligation, people don’t do so well. AI also poses what the Atlantic story calls a “mass desocialization event.” We’ve already seen how mediating our lives through screens can be much more isolating than connective—we are able to reach many more people, but the depth and quality of those connections is much lower. We saw this with the pandemic, too: Being at home and communicating via Zoom was not nearly as meaningful as being in person, and while work-from-home has been in many ways wonderful, it’s also contributed to social isolation. We are more atomized than at any point in modern history. More of us live alone. We have fewer friends. And we are by most psychological measures worse off because we spend less time together in person. The more connected among us are doing better; the less-connected are doing worse. And the fewer reasons we have to leave our homes and our devices, the harder it will be to reverse any of these trends.
. . . . .
None of this is to say that we should simply shut down AI research and development. For one, that just isn’t going to happen. For two, even if the U.S. shut it down, far worse actors would keep going, and there is certainly a big benefit to being first in this race. But I am not at all convinced that the people leading the development of this radical new technology have any idea what they’re doing. I think they know technically what they’re doing. But I don’t think they have the knowledge of international relations or history or psychology or security or really anything else to understand what they may be unleashing into the world, and how it might (or might not) be controlled and regulated, used and misused. I think they’re driven by a desire to discover and to be first, and perhaps to make an absolute buttload of money—without coming close to appreciating what it might mean for the world, or what it might mean for the 8 billion human beings whose lives will be touched if not overhauled by this humanity-changing endeavor.
A few years back, I wrote a book about feminism and happiness, and the intersection of those two topics remains one of my chief interests. One thing that is clear in most of the research into human happiness is that what people think will make them happy, or what gives us a quick short-term thrill, is not actually related to what makes us happy in the long-term—what leads to a life that feels good and rich and meaningful, or simply what results in contentedness. AI may be very good at giving us what we say we want. I am skeptical, though, that it will be any good at all at delivering what we actually need. And it may deliver the kind of devastation we never bargained for.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/11/29/ai-artificial-intelligence-openai/
You Should Be Terrified of What's Happening With AI
You Should Be Terrified of What’s Happening With AI
11/29/2023 by Jill Filipovic
The Sam Altman OpenAI story is being covered as a Succession-style drama. It’s actually about the future of humanity.
(Nikolas Kokovlis / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
This story originally appeared on Jill.substack.com, a newsletter from journalist, lawyer and author Jill Filipovic.
Last week, the story of Sam Altman leaving OpenAI dominated the U.S. headlines, in part because it was just all so dramatic: A young genius who checks all the Silicon Valley boxes (white guy / prepper / dropped out of Stanford / extremely confident he is changing the world for the better,) who is also widely recognized as the most important person in AI, was unceremoniously pushed out of the AI company he ran, leading to a staff revolt against the board that pushed him out, a soft landing at Microsoft, and then, within days, reinstatement into his old position and a quick reshuffling of the board in which all the women were removed and replaced with men, including Larry “men are better at math than women” Summers. Spicy! But news outlets really did us all a disservice by initially framing this as a Succession-style power struggle rather than what it really is: a battle for the future of humanity. And not just for our jobs, but for our very basic ability to survive as a species.
. . . .
AI may very well make our lives easier. It will almost certainly put any of us out of work. But it may also leave us adrift—without obligation, people don’t do so well. AI also poses what the Atlantic story calls a “mass desocialization event.” We’ve already seen how mediating our lives through screens can be much more isolating than connective—we are able to reach many more people, but the depth and quality of those connections is much lower. We saw this with the pandemic, too: Being at home and communicating via Zoom was not nearly as meaningful as being in person, and while work-from-home has been in many ways wonderful, it’s also contributed to social isolation. We are more atomized than at any point in modern history. More of us live alone. We have fewer friends. And we are by most psychological measures worse off because we spend less time together in person. The more connected among us are doing better; the less-connected are doing worse. And the fewer reasons we have to leave our homes and our devices, the harder it will be to reverse any of these trends.
. . . . .
None of this is to say that we should simply shut down AI research and development. For one, that just isn’t going to happen. For two, even if the U.S. shut it down, far worse actors would keep going, and there is certainly a big benefit to being first in this race. But I am not at all convinced that the people leading the development of this radical new technology have any idea what they’re doing. I think they know technically what they’re doing. But I don’t think they have the knowledge of international relations or history or psychology or security or really anything else to understand what they may be unleashing into the world, and how it might (or might not) be controlled and regulated, used and misused. I think they’re driven by a desire to discover and to be first, and perhaps to make an absolute buttload of money—without coming close to appreciating what it might mean for the world, or what it might mean for the 8 billion human beings whose lives will be touched if not overhauled by this humanity-changing endeavor.
A few years back, I wrote a book about feminism and happiness, and the intersection of those two topics remains one of my chief interests. One thing that is clear in most of the research into human happiness is that what people think will make them happy, or what gives us a quick short-term thrill, is not actually related to what makes us happy in the long-term—what leads to a life that feels good and rich and meaningful, or simply what results in contentedness. AI may be very good at giving us what we say we want. I am skeptical, though, that it will be any good at all at delivering what we actually need. And it may deliver the kind of devastation we never bargained for.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/11/29/ai-artificial-intelligence-openai/
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