AI scientist De Kai offers a new vision for ‘parenting' AI to avoid our own demise
artificial intelligence (AI) has been cast as a high-stakes contest between the US and China – a technological arms race with global consequences. But to De Kai, a pioneering machine learning scientist and advocate for AI ethics, this framing fundamentally misunderstands the technology.
'I would prefer to think about it as the AI climate change challenge,' De Kai said in an interview with the Post at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he is a professor of computer science and engineering. 'Literally, AI is a change to the [social] climate that humanity is competing in.'
De Kai, whose surname is Wu but who professionally goes by only his given name, has spent four decades at the forefront of AI research, going back to his work in natural language processing during his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1980s. His new book, Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future, released on June 3, argues that living with AI requires a paradigm shift – one in which people 'parent' these systems as if they were their children.
'What's the single thing in folks' lives that makes them most want to become better versions of themselves?' De Kai writes. 'Having kids, most grown folks say.'
Since AI is learning by absorbing everything we do and say online, we need to be conscientious about who we are around our AI 'children', the argument goes.
De Kai's book Raising AI makes an argument for treating AI as children that must be parented by good role models. Photo: Amazon
This is not a new concern for De Kai, who has served on the board of The Future Society and was an inaugural member of Google's short-lived AI ethics council.
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