AI expert: The monitoring should be expanded

AI expert: The monitoring should be expanded

Berlin, 5.6.23

Meredith Whitacker – head of the foundation behind the chat app Signal – urgently warned of the current hype surrounding artificial intelligence at the Berlin digital conference Republica.

„The AI commercialization narrative serves to mystify, solidify and expand the surveillance business model at the core of the tech industry,“ said Meredith Whitacker at the start of the three-day event on Monday. It’s about control over workers and social control, she said.
Whitacker sees a particular problem in the fact that applications with artificial intelligence are said to have the ability to be superior to humans – although there is no evidence for this „mythology“. Accordingly, she criticized the recent warning from AI experts, who put the technology in line with existential risks such as pandemics or nuclear war. „There is no evidence that AI is on the verge of becoming a malicious super-intelligence, or will ever be,“ said the longtime Google executive, but such warnings trigger „adrenaline rushes and awe“ – and don’t even need to be legitimate to affect our lives. „The more we buy into this hype, the more power we give to a handful of corporations to dictate how our world works and what our place in it is.“
Signal is a chat app operated by a nonprofit foundation that’s designed for privacy with full encryption. Along with other chat services such as WhatsApp, Signal resists attempts to weaken encryption to fight crime. The idea that AI could reconcile such measures with data protection is illusory, Whitacker emphasized.