AI Technology - What Happens if "Us" Isn't "We"?

 

 AI Technology - What Happens if "Us" Isn't "We"? The Future of Autonomous Agents and Multimodal Memories

What happens if "us" isn't "we"? We're getting it whether or not we're prepared for a "Total Recall"! "It's all up to us now" (excellent).

This week at MSBuild, Microsoft unveiled "Recall," to wildly divergent reactions ranging from enthusiastic to frightened. With the help of 40 mm "small language models," our computers will soon possess multimodal "photographic memories" that will allow them to observe and arrange everything on our decisions through "timeline retrieval," "enhanced interaction," "local processing," and "semantic search."

This will undoubtedly open the door for autonomous agents. When we consider that Microsoft has also announced that it is collaborating with Cognition, the company behind Devin, an autonomous coding agent that recently raised $175 million at a $2 billion valuation, as well as GitHub Copilot and related technology from Google like "Goose," we can see enormous potential.


Even so, many individuals find this news to be far more worrisome than exciting, despite Microsoft's insistence that data privacy is their main concern. Security breaches (because private information must be often recorded and preserved in the age of self-governing entities), data warehousing issues, hacking, and a myriad of other issues are among the concerns.


This video clip from the well-known 1990 movie Total Recall examines the theory that "memory manipulation blurs the lines between reality and illusion, leading to paranoia and distrust." Despite defeating the enemy Cohaagen and terraforming Mars to win the plot, Douglas Quaid (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) is still confused about whether what he has experienced is a dream or simply a product of his imagination.

Given how much of what we see in these vintage science fiction films is based on actual events, it might be time to give them a second look. The ramifications of decentralisation, lack of transparency, and machines that are smarter than humans and try to govern them have been brought to our attention. We have now reached the following scene in our group "movie":

"It's all up to you now" (US). Let us rectify this together.