The Race For AI, And, Can We Control Agents?

For those who have been following along with the AI story since the stuff was new, we are in a very specific moment right now, where what some investors might call FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) is higher than it’s ever been, in some ways. Let me explain.

It seems like for the very first time, now, there’s a real sense that this could go awry. It probably has to do with researchers and engineers for the big companies jumping ship and providing their testimonies to the press – although that has happened, to some extent, before.

But think back to any of those moments, through the past couple of years, as machine learning became deep learning, and deep learning became …. Something else. AI-written poetry? AI-generated graphics? AI writing code? Cool! (Very few people moaned for the writers and musicians and artists – and many of them were the writers and musicians and artists.)

Now. However, the humans are looking at real agentic collaboration, culminating in things like the Hugging Face incident, and many are a little spooked.

So I thought this was a very good conversation at the Imagination in Action The Next Endeavor event, in Mountain View, CA, where a panel discussed those big questions around whether we can really control AI, or not. (Disclaimer: With Imagination in Action, I help to put on these events.)

It’s Watching

I thought that moderator Bradley Olson started off appropriately with the observation that you can’t have a recorded conversation in San Francisco (or, increasingly, anywhere else) without turning on the AI note-taking system, where the technology builds a detailed profile of everything you say, and maybe even how you sit.

That in hand, he asked the panel to think about how much of the current problem has to do with a simple lack of controls, and not a fundamental, permanent threat of rogue AI. In other words, with a simple set of protocols, can we contain these agents?

Fear and Fur

Of those questions:

His words were: