AI is still in the News

Will AI really kill us all?

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." 

Clickbait (also known as link bait or linkbait) is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow ("click") that link and view, read, stream or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.

From the article with the click bait headline:

“I did not expect it to go this viral,” he said on an interview with CNN. “But clearly there was latent demand for this thing to absolutely explode.”

No one is really scared. It's gossip. It's a ratings battle. 

I make my livin' off the evenin' news

Just give me somethin', somethin' I can use

The only latent demand is for something they can call news while getting enough of a reaction out of people to get clicks.

According to Coxon, who has also previously worked at OpenAI, his former employers are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence” that could “kill us all by the end of the decade”.

Superintelligence, which refers to artificial intelligence that exceeds the cognitive abilities of humans in all domains”, is still a long way off, but some believe AI has already reached parity with humans.

I write a parenting site. I did pro bono work in gifted education and had access to industry insiders for a time.

Rest assured, humans don't yet know how to deal with human intelligence effectively. And also there's all kinds of challenges in defining and measuring intelligence.

We can't sort that out for humans yet.

According to one researcher, we are also already past the point that AI could wipe out humanity, albeit with human assistance.

The 2015 movie Survivor ends with saying the protagonist saved over a million people by stopping a terrorist attack. And then posts the following words on the screen before the credits roll:

Since 9/11, the FBI has stopped 53 terrorist attacks in New York City alone.

The movie In the Line of Fire says there's something like 1400 death threats against the US president annually and the FBI checks out every single one.

Why am I using fictional movies as sources? Because I believe that's probably accurate and the FBI is not blaring that information to the world. See also this previous post for more opinions of mine about the news.

“If OpenAI wanted to cripple an entire nation, they easily could today,” he wrote on X. “All they’d have to do is remove alignment and unleash an agent swarm. It could probably within a day or so get access to all of the nation’s data centres and shut off all the country’s utilities.

Cool. Awesome. Fabulous.

You know who needs and cannot live without data centers and utilities? That would be artificial intelligence.

Humans need food, shelter, clothes and clean water. A previous post on this site talking about the movie Live Free or Die Hard states I couldn't readily find data on things like:

1. How much hyper local electric production exists in the US?

2. What percentage of Americans live off grid?

I write about things like Passive Solar Design. If you are scared about what is going on with AI, do what a lot of professional programmers do and become a Luddite who uses the most old fashioned, not computerized or electric dependent solutions you can readily incorporate into your life so when AI goes nuts and takes over the world, you can carry on with life with relatively minor inconveniences.

they could cause extreme havoc,” he said. “For example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extinction-level bioweapons, there’s a lot of ways that the AI could actuate itself in the world.”

Oh. My. God!!!! BIOWEAPONS!!!!

We are currently working FURIOUSLY on the next pandemic, superbug or similar by being MORONS who travel too much, have a top heavy global economy shafting the little people and letting the rich get away with too much, not caring enough about things like basic housing and water infrastructure for the poorest people and so forth.

Governments didn't know how to respond effectively to COVID-19 and didn't really rise to the occasion and now that it's over, we are back to business as usual for the most part and to my knowledge we aren't collectively trying to put in protections against a repeat.

Is AI dangerous? Oh, certainly.

Cars are dangerous and we keep driving them and people who are vociferously anti car are largely viewed as nutters.

And also rest assured that MythBusters thoroughly debunked the movie meme that cars blow up and catch fire every time they wreck. I mean these guys enjoy blowing stuff up and found it so impossible to get a car to explode, they used explosives to get their "Blow stuff up" fix for the episode.

AI is dangerous. And most likely like cars, the worst harm will be something prosaic and largely overlooked, such as the current high electric bills and environmental damage we are allowing AI data centers to inflict upon the US while the people object and the rich ignore them.