David Byrne has never been one to shy away from the unfamiliar, but artificial intelligence is one technological frontier he isn’t particularly optimistic about.
In a new interview with i-D Magazine, the Talking Heads frontman offered a rather ominous prediction about the future of AI by suggesting that it’s leading us in the wrong direction. However, he still acknowledged that the technology can be beneficial if used for the right things.
“I like to think that certain aspects of AI can be used as a handy tool,” he said. “If you’re analyzing spreadsheets and you want to see a pattern, AI might be good at that. I’ve read that it’s good for, like, skin doctors discovering the beginning of a melanoma, that the AI can pick it out sometimes better than a doctor can. If it’s trustworthy as a tool, that seems useful.”
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Despite the AI’s potential, Byrne is convinced it’s ultimately going to be of detriment to us.
“I’ve heard of students using it to write their papers, and then they end up with no knowledge of the thing they just wrote about,” he said. “And I think, ‘Oh, it’s going to make people really stupid.’”
He continued, “Of course, there’s all the stuff we read about it breaking out of the sandbox and hacking into whatever, deceiving its masters. I could have predicted that. I’ve read enough science fiction. This was inevitable—and it’s not going to end well.”
Despite his misgivings about the tech, Byrne hasn’t entirely surrendered to pessimism. Elsewhere in the interview, he expressed confidence in humanity’s ability to weather difficult times.
“It’s a struggle,” he explained. “We’re fighting an uphill battle because the human brain loves bad news. You’ll doom scroll through bad news forever. We’ve evolved to be aware of warnings: is that a tiger in the bush? I’m going to assume it is, and that way I won’t die.’”
He concluded, “But then there are little pockets of people doing really interesting things, solving problems. And that goes quite a ways to mitigate the stuff you read in the paper. It helps you realize: it’s not all gloom and doom. I’m optimistic that people will persevere.”
Earlier this month, he published Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, a book examining how once-overlooked artistic, scientific, and technological breakthroughs can find renewed relevance decades or even centuries later.
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