"Devastating harm at magnitude never seen before"

From Scientific American:

....The performance of AI rests on exploitative labor practices, both domestically and internationally. And massive, opaque AI models that are fed problematic data often exacerbate existing biases in society—affecting everything from criminal sentencing and policing to health care, lending, housing and hiring. 

In addition, the environmental impacts of running such energy-hungry AI models stress already fragile ecosystems reeling from the impacts of climate change.

AI also promises to make potentially perilous technology more accessible to rogue actors. Last year researchers asked a generative AI model to design new chemical weapons. It designed 40,000 potential weapons in six hours. An earlier version of ChatGPT generated bomb-making instructions. 

And a class exercise at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently demonstrated how AI can help create synthetic pathogens, which could potentially ignite the next pandemic. 

By spreading access to such dangerous information, AI threatens to become the computerized equivalent of an assault weapon or a high-capacity magazine: a vehicle for one rogue person to unleash devastating harm at a magnitude never seen before....

See also Scorpions' Dance.