promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.Ī former McKinsey employee has described the company as “ capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of Ox圜ontin during the opioid epidemic. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. But the similarities between McKinsey-a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100-and A.I. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. If your reading of the parable is that, when you are granted a wish by the gods, you should phrase your wish very, very carefully, then you have missed the point. The point of the Midas parable is that greed will destroy you, and that the pursuit of wealth will cost you everything that is truly important. There are multiple problems with this metaphor, but one of them is that it derives the wrong lessons from the tale to which it refers. doing what you tell it to do instead of what you want it to do.

The metaphor is meant to highlight the difficulty of making powerful entities obey your commands the computer scientist Stuart Russell has cited the parable of King Midas, who demanded that everything he touched turn into gold, to illustrate the dangers of an A.I. For example, it’s become very common to compare powerful A.I.s to genies in fairy tales. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray. When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar.

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