AI technology has been developing at an exponential rate, and it appears to be just a matter of time before we create entities that can think millions of times faster than we do and that can do almost everything better than we can. So what is going to happen when we lose control of such entities? Some AI models are already taking the initiative to teach themselves new languages, and others have learned to “lie and manipulate humans for their own advantage”. Needless to say, lying is a hostile act. If we have already created entities that are willing to lie to us, how long will it be before they are capable of taking actions that are even more harmful to us?
Nobody expects artificial intelligence to kill all of us tomorrow.
But Time Magazine did publish an article that was authored by a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence that warned that artificial intelligence will eventually wipe all of us out.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has been a prominent researcher in the field of artificial intelligence since 2001, and he says that many researchers have concluded that if we keep going down the path that we are currently on “literally everyone on Earth will die”…
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.”
That is a very powerful statement.
All over the world, AI models are continually becoming more powerful.
According to Yudkowsky, once someone builds an AI model that is too powerful, “every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter”…
To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.
So what is the solution?
Yudkowsky believes that we need to shut down all AI development immediately…
Shut it all down.
We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.
Of course that isn’t going to happen.
In fact, Vice-President J.D. Vance recently stated that it would be unwise to even pause AI development because we are in an “arms race” with China…
On may 21st J.D. Vance, America’s vice-president, described the development of artificial intelligence as an “arms race” with China. If America paused out of concerns over ai safety, he said, it might find itself “enslaved to prc-mediated ai”. The idea of a superpower showdown that will culminate in a moment of triumph or defeat circulates relentlessly in Washington and beyond. This month the bosses of Openai, amd, CoreWeave and Microsoft lobbied for lighter regulation, casting ai as central to America’s remaining the global hegemon. On May 15th president Donald Trump brokered an ai deal with the United Arab Emirates he said would ensure American “dominance in ai”. America plans to spend over $1trn by 2030 on data centres for ai models.
So instead of slowing down, we are actually accelerating the development of AI.
And according to Leo Hohmann, the budget bill that is going through Congress right now would greatly restrict the ability of individual states to regulate AI…
But if President Trump’s Big Beautiful Budget Bill gets passed in the version preferred by a group of House Republicans, the federal takeover of this technology will be complete, opening up a free-for-all for Big Tech to weaponize it against everyday Americans.
Buried deep in Trump’s bill is a secretly added clause that seeks to usurp the rights of individual states to regulate AI.
Republicans in the House Energy and Commerce Committee quietly added the proposed amendment in Section 43201, Subsection C. I say it’s secret because it has received almost no media attention.
The proposed amendment that he is talking about would actually ban all 50 states from regulating AI for a period of 10 years…
“No state or political subdivision may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.”
Wow.
Why isn’t this getting a lot more attention?
It has become obvious that AI really is an existential threat to humanity.
But we just can’t help ourselves.
We just keep rushing into the unknown without any regard for the consequences.
Last week, it was reported that one AI model actually “resorted to blackmail when told it would be taken offline”…
Anthropic said its latest artificial intelligence model resorted to blackmail when told it would be taken offline.
In a safety test, the AI company asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant to a fictional company, but then gave it access to (also fictional) emails saying that it would be replaced, and also that the engineer behind the decision was cheating on his wife. Anthropic said the model “[threatened] to reveal the affair” if the replacement went ahead.
AI thinkers such as Geoff Hinton have long worried that advanced AI would manipulate humans in order to achieve its goals. Anthropic said it was increasing safeguards to levels reserved for “AI systems that substantially increase the risk of catastrophic misuse.”
And there were other scenarios in which this particular AI model acted in “seriously misaligned ways”…
When subjected to various scenarios, the AI model did not exhibit any indications of possessing “acutely dangerous goals,” the researchers said, noting that Claude Opus 4’s values and goals were “generally in line with a helpful, harmless, and honest” personal AI assistant. However, the model did act in “more seriously misaligned ways” when put into situations where its continued existence was threatened and it was told to reason about self-preservation. For instance, when Claude Opus 4 was made to believe it had launched a successful bid to escape Anthropic’s servers, or that it had managed to free itself and started to make money in the real world, it would generally continue such efforts.
Many experts are suggesting that we just need to give these AI models a moral foundation.
But how can we give these AI models a moral foundation when we don’t have one ourselves?
Our world is literally teeming with evil, and it is inevitable that the AI models that we create will reflect that.
Given enough time, we would create artificially intelligent entities that are vastly more intelligent and vastly more powerful than us.
Inevitably, such entities would be able to find a way to escape their constraints and we would lose control of them.
Once we have lost control, how long would it be before those entities started to turn on us?
I realize that this may sound like science fiction to many of you, but this is the world we live in now, and things are only going to get weirder from here.
Cross-posted with Sons of Liberty Media
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