There have been large scale mass media hoaxes for as long as there has been mass media.
From Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast to deepfakes of Tom Cruise, there is a long history of manipulating people into believing that something they are seeing, or hearing, is real when it is in fact not.
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This week, there were calls on social media for the government to regulate AI based on what has widely been reported to be an AI generated image of an explosion outside of the Pentagon.
Circulation of the purported AI image -- the image could have just as easily been created by a human using Photoshop -- on Twitter caused a selloff in stock trading that resulted in a 30 point dip in the S&P 500.
Ignoring the fact that the Washington Post, New York Times and other reputable mainstream publications did not spread the deceitful image and pass it off as truth, the episode once again has people asking about the threat AI poses to our future as a civilization.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked if AI was the biggest threat to humanity, but he has another societal issue in mind that will pose a bigger threat.
“Here are the facts. We are not having enough children, and we have not been having enough children for long enough that there is a demographic crisis where people who are my age are going to be taken care of by younger generations,” Schmidt said at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit in London, Fortune reported.
But that doesn't mean Schmidt isn't concerned about what AI could mean for the future also.
"There's scenarios, not today, but reasonably soon, where these systems will be able to find zero-day exploits in cyber issues or discover new types of biology ... when that happens we want to be ready to know how to make sure these things are not misused by evil people," Schmidt said.
You can check out the entire interview below.
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