Here is a typical calm well-reasoned take on computer models (a.k.a. AI):
I pointed out: “Stop terrorizing yourself. AI is just computer models, hooked to the wall by cords that can be unplugged.”
Just like with “climate change” and during the covid panic, this good and true news was not taken well. At all. One fellow’s response was typical: “It’s okay my man keep reading your cope fiction. You just don’t understand that in the near future AI will be a god-like entity”.
You will have seen many similar pronouncements of Doom. AI is going to take all white collar jobs. AI is going to slaughter Hollywood. AI is going to gut the legal profession. AI will code everything, and all engineers will be out on the street.
AI is going to get us all. We need to get it before it gets us. But don’t think AI doesn’t “know” this and will take steps to stop us.
Common is this report: “Daisy McGregor, UK policy chief at Anthropic, a top AI company, says it’s ‘massively concerning’ that Anthropic’s Claude AI has shown in testing that it’s willing to blackmail and kill in order to avoid being shut down.”
She was asked, “It was ready to kill someone, wasn’t it?” She answered, “Yes.”
How? How could a computer model kill somebody? By flashing the screen hoping somebody looking at it would have a seizure? Spitting out nasty messages on a terminal nobody has to view? Sending emails to hitmen with your home address?
Blackmail is slightly more believable. It could threaten to broadcast a user’s sexual proclivities, or equally nefarious online behaviors. But all coders have to do is insert code to make it stop that.The code wouldn’t have the capability in the first place had the coders not allowed the possibility.
Either way, all we have to do is unplug it.
“No, Briggs! Unplugging will be impossible! Impossible! AI is hooked into everything. It is inserting hidden copies of itself everywhere! If we unplug it we will all die! Everything will crash!”
Perhaps we don’t have to unplug it, but merely slow down research?
“This won’t work. And if we go slow or unplug, China will win the AI race!”
Race to where? To their doom?
Many, many people offered these very arguments to me. It’s like Y2K was infected by covid.
Unplugging would cause temporary delays in some things. We know what these are like. We have internet and other associated outages all the time. Even things like air traffic control has gone down, not to mention airlines themselves. The SWIFT global money transfer system went down in 2024 for some time. Et cetera, et cetera.
Yet we abide.
What everybody seems to forget is that we have have computer models hooked to everything for years. A mixed blessing, to be sure, but we do abide. AI is the same thing but with a different label.
AI-doom mongering is yet another in a long and endless line of panics. We only just got out of one. And now we need another. People must have really enjoyed the last one, and were nostalgic for it.
This fresh panic has so far mainly seized so-called elites. “Something Big is Happening” wrote one of them, or rather had AI write for him, to millions of views. It wasn’t clear if he was all in on panicking or selling the AI systems in which he has an interest.
Like all these things, there is vast imprecision in the panic. You get the idea of dread, but you’re never quite sure what form it’s supposed to take. Nail down a specific reason for panic and it’s instantly abandoned for other reasons. Mutually contradictory things are believed with equal ardency. What matters, as in all panics, is that you are seen to care.
I tried showing many the article proving AI is just a computer model, and has not and will not, reach AGI. Which you’d think would be welcomed with great cheers of joy. What good news! There is no reason to worry!
Can you guess whether this news was received gratefully and happily or hatefully and with great scorn? Exchanges like this were common:
“AI will be a god-like entity!”
God-like? What kind of god, like?
“It will take all jobs away and everybody will starve!”
Everybody will just sort of mill around all day, waiting to die, as AI rules the world?
“It will change everything!”
I hope it can change my oil. But I won’t be afford to buy it, since I won’t have a job. There won’t even be any oil, since nobody will be able to buy it. Or have any need for it.
No one bothers thinking this through.
One guy. “I’m cutting you some slack because you’re uneducated… The only way to stop a virus…. An Ai is to turn off every source or energy all at once. This thing lives, moves, and may well be conscious. The only thing that can save us is a CME…. Aka a coronal mass ejection or solar flare causing an EMP…. Guess what, we’re well overdue for one too.”
Another: “I hope you’re one of the first people to die from AI.”
On and on and on; vitriol is never in short supply.
Now about AI stealing all jobs, how is it that everybody forgets Parkinson’s law? Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. This has been a solid an economic fact as anything, but somehow AI will end it? Of course not. From the link: “A 8-month field study at a US tech company with about 200 employees found that AI use did not shrink work, it intensified it, and made employees busier”.
No kidding. A simple outcome predictable to anyone not upset by demons of their own creation.
People love and cherish their fear. We saw it in the covid panic, too. Do not try to bring any panicker good news. They do not take it well.
I’m sure we’ll have more to say about this later.
Video
More
- AI Cannot Hallucinate Nor Lie
- “AI Will Kill Us All!” Say People Programming AI To Kill Us All
- AI Limitations (and Strengths): Predictions
- The Limitations Of AI: General Or Real Intelligence Is Not Possible
- Why The Recent Claims Of AGI Fail: Plus, A New Test For AGI
- AI Needs To Feed On Fresh Meat, Or It Dies
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It is true that these individuals are psyching themselves into panic. If “AI” systems are a cheat code for the universe, why do they need such a vast infrastructure, such enormous amounts of electricity, such gargantuan investments to make them profitable, and armies of human workers to program and maintain them?
Also, the techno-oligarchs clearly do not believe in they are about to unleash an unstoppable force. These are people who have spent decades building up wealth and influence, so if they really thought that, they would never go through with it because it would shatter all of their empires. Even if the oligarchs and CEO’s thought they could control it, they would perpetually be the junior partner in the relationship.
Think about it – these are people who dishonestly bloviate about inevitable technological progress so that they can replace other people, but never replace themselves. And yet, a truly superhuman intelligence could easily replace them. So, one can reason that these people do not actually believe that these melodramatic predictions will happen.
But just as with 6 years ago, if the mainstream explanation is not true, then there must be some other reason for why people are doing all these things. And the answer is pretty much the same: totalitarianism. The goal is to replace and control people and further centralize power and wealth. It is neither a milestone for humanity nor some benign software, like a new type of spreadsheet, but a totalitarian project.
Okay Sgt. Briggs, are you *trying* to get yourself into trouble every time there is a panic going about? xD
You’re not, I know, but that was a funny line I wanted to get off my chest. At any rate, I’m happy to be here as this newest panic is starting, so I can see how it all unfolds from this vantage point. Here’s to a happy ride for us all! \o/
Rep Thomas Massie once did a video on how if electric vehicles were widespread adopted across our transportation network, the power grid would be overwhelmed. We see this whenever it gets cold or hot. The grid gets strained and brownouts, or even blackouts, start to ripple through the system. AI is more power hungry than Teslas and will most likely unplug itself as our neglected power grid collapses under its own weight. It’s a tool and like all tools will be subject to human hubris and misuse.
It’s sort of like covid, in that I don’t worry as much about AI as I worry about AI hysteria and what kind of nonsense a bunch of assholes, backed by millions of morons, will inflict on me as a result.
I don’t know Sarge but the part about gutting the legal profession did cause my ears to perk up…
AI is taking too long to collapse though so its causing economic damage. Increased price of computer components. Making it hard to get programming jobs. AI needs to be murdered not allowed to collapse on its own. Where are the hackers? Infect AI infrastructre with a virus or something bro.
There is an HR system that uses AI to blacklist people so they can nevwr get jobs. We need a Hitler who will camp and gas everyone who is for AI.
For a long time, I though AI was short for Albert. I couldn’t help myself.
AI should be required to provide all the needs of a person it removes from the work force. Homes, good food, utilities, entertainment, transportation, untaxable, etc.
No personal economy required.
“You will have seen many similar pronouncements of Doom…. AI is going to slaughter Hollywood.”
I’m missing the “doom” in that particular example.
Bill: I’ve got a friend who is enthralled by all the wonderful things AI can do. He is well-connected in the DHS and government S&T realm, and he tells me that his experience with AI practitioners is that the code is “learning” or “teaching itself” inside the code, and that this represents a quantum leap in software history. I countered that if the AI is “learning” and “teaching itself”, isn’t that what it was coded to do?
A quote from an email he sent me:
“Go talk to the AI coders and computer engineers. They will tell you almost unequivocally that they will very likely be out of a coding job in the next year – the business of coding is soon to be as dead as the buggy whip. Read this – they are not needed to code any more, because the model is modeling itself, it writes its own code. I know this because I still talk with these people. I was on the phone last Friday with SRI talking to the heads of their Cyber Security department, both Stanford PhDs in computer engineering, and we were discussing this very topic…”
“…by the people I talk to who are in the game right now the model writes its own code and improves itself with just about zero input from them.”
There’s more but that’s the gist of it. I’ve pointed him to your slew of articles cutting the AI hype down to size, but to no avail.
Can you at least comment on this for your regular readers?
Many thanks
The One World Government and the One World Religion really are on their way!,
God bless, C-Marie
AI is actually Indians, that is to say in a call centre somewhere someone is monitoring every “autonomous” vehicle/robot/machine except for dumb stuff like the vacuum cleaners that mess up your house if you let them loose, or the mowers that get stuck (though possibly the more expensive versions or subscription versions do have overseers).
As for LLM here’s a great YouTube Channel exposing them as fancy autocomplete: https://www.youtube.com/@FatherPhi
When you think of the AI revolution, should it happen, think of “Privatize the profits, socialize the costs.” The profits of AI will go, privately, to the people who control the AIs. The costs — the massive use of electricity and water, the displacement of workers, and the societal rot that ensues from idle hands, that will be socialized.
Yes “AI” is just computer models. Better – in the sense of more competent in tasks than before. This does not mean that they are benign or not about to kill or enslave you.
Policies are also models, but “government” models. These have a long history of killing and enslaving people. Models owned and implemented by government, policy or AI, cannot be “unplugged from the wall”, certainly not by mere plebs.
I’m thinking of The Middle Kingdom’s implementation of AI: facial recognition, gait detection, internet surveillance, social credit. And of Dr Strangelove, a tale of a computer model. And of the actual near end of the world in 1983 which, it is said, was averted by Stanislav Petrov who disobeyed his meatware/policy program. Were he to be (or now that he has been?) replaced by an AI model, what might happen (given what we know)?
BRIGGS YOU FOOL OF ARTIFICIALITY!
Aye Eye exists for one reason and ONE REASON ONLY!
To INCREASE Shareholder Value!
If Shareholder Value doesn’t increase, YOU’RE DOOMED!!!
AMERICA IS DOOMED!!!
THE ENTIRE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS DOOMED!!!
WE’RE ALL DOOMED!!!
I hope you weren’t looking forward to any kind of retirement package!
Because without A.I., it’ll be up to you to continue to analyze all these stats, and to wrack your brain coming up with all that comedic insight that comes to you so naturally, and take precious time out of your dwindling life to make tweets mocking your enemies!
Then you won’t have time for the all the more important things you could’ve been doing to increase shareholder value!
Is that the sort of life that is worth it to you Briggs??? Huh? Answer me!!!