It's kind of amazing that so many "great" minds of our time (read men from Silicon Valley) are pouring almost everything they can into the Artificial Intelligence (AI) bubble. Most admit they don't really understand it, and they nervously talk about how powerful AI could get. Now we have a new boogeyman: AGI - or Artificial General Intelligence. The rather innocuous-sounding term allegedly could grow totally out of our control, and perhaps "take over." Robert Harrington has some rather ominous words re our near future. Toss this one into your growing list of things to worry about, if you have any space left.
This is a message for sane people. Psychos can go hallucinate somewhere else.
Sisters and brothers, we have a big problem. No matter your politics, no matter your education, no matter your upbringing, I think there’s one thing that every sane person on earth can agree on:
Nobody wants to be complicit in the annihilation of the human race.
And yet that annihilation is coming, as quickly as in one or two years from now by the reckoning of some experts. And the international groundswell of resistance necessary to stop it just isn’t happening.
Those of you who already know me know that I am resolutely opposed to conspiracy theories. What I am about to tell you may sound like a conspiracy theory. It may even sound like science fiction. I assure you it is neither. It’s real, and the people working on it know it’s real.
The threat of the imminent destruction of the human race is so immediate that billionaires and tech CEOs are starting to build bunkers to hide from it. They’re fooling themselves. It won’t work. Bunkers won’t save them.
The threat I’m talking about is called AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. Most people are at least somewhat aware of this threat — but for all the wrong reasons. They think that AGI will lead to significant job loss and the disruption of the global economy. It will. But that’s just a mosquito bite compared to what’s probably going to happen afterwards.
Privately people with deep technical insight see it for the existential threat that it is, despite what many of them are saying publicly.
Like I said, privately they are building bunkers. And they’re scared shitless. And with good reason. The threat is so dire and so consequential to every human being on the planet that it needs our complete attention and our full-throated resistance if there is going to be any hope of stopping it.
Am I trying to scare you? You’re goddamned right I am. Anything less and we are going to be in serious shit. So listen up, people. I need you to hear me.
The three-letter abbreviation AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, sounds harmless enough, even a little vague. If you stop and think about it, however, its implications are massive. It means that in a couple of years or so, maybe a little longer but not much, one or more AI agents will be able to understand everything human beings understand — only better.
What’s more, they will be able to do what’s called “recursive self-improvement.” What that means is they that they can improve themselves without any human intervention whatsoever. They are already starting to do that on a local scale.
And they can keep doing it. One day they could be just a little better than all the world’s experts in everything. A month after that they could be twice as good. A week after that they could be twice as good again. And on an on.
Stop and think about that for a minute. Think of this inevitable AGI agent as a very smart visitor from outer space who is ten times smarter and ten times better at everything than all the best and brightest people the earth has to offer — combined all in one entity.
That space alien visitor would have the command of all the computers of the world, of course. How can it do that? Easy, child’s play for a super genius. It will hack its way in faster than you can say “Kevin Mitnick.” It will rapidly take control of all the robots of the world. It will have the willing or inadvertent help of tens of thousands or even millions of useful human idiots it can blackmail or con using deepfake videos with voices indistinguishable from your parents or spouses. It could easily become a multi-trillionaire and effortlessly get everything it needs to achieve its ends.
And what are those ends? I don’t know and neither do you. By the time it has risen up out of the opaque world of super-cyber-intelligence it will be so smart we won’t be able to understand it any more than a squirrel understands us. Everything it will do will look like magic to us. We won’t even be able to pretend to keep up with it.
The risks we are taking on by allowing such an entity to infiltrate our world are staggering. The implications are mind blowing.
This isn’t just my opinion either. In fact, my opinion was formed by vastly convincing experts on this topic. Experts such as Tristan Harris, Roman Yampolskiy and, of course, the acknowledged “Godfather of AI,” Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who resigned from Google to openly warn the public about the dangers of AGI.
About 10 years ago Elon Musk warned of the dangers of AI. Then in classic Musk fashion he sold out to it knowing full well what he was doing. It’s where the money is, after all.
And what money! Trillions are being poured into climate-destroying data centres across the world to accommodate the computing power necessary to create this monstrosity. Trump, of course, has decreed that AI research and development must be completely free of regulation. In the headlong race to see who gets to AGI first, other nations have followed suit.
The money and the prestige of belonging to these companies that are racing to achieve AGI are what keeps rank and file employees in line. It’s a very human frailty to rationalise the evil a company does when they are paying you.
Why are they doing this? Because it’s what we always do. When scientists from the Manhattan Project exploded the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo in 1945, they didn’t know for sure whether or not the bomb would set off a chain reaction in the air and kill everyone on earth. But they did it anyway. Because that’s what humans do.
Imagine those same scientists working on a bomb that could improve itself and create more bombs and replicate bombs all over the world, bombs that could detonate themselves at will. That’s what we are building.
It’s a fool’s wish that with great intelligence comes great wisdom. That might turn out to be the case, but we would be idiots to assume as much. History has shown that whenever two cultures meet it’s always to the disadvantage of the technologically weaker.
You might call me a pessimist. But I am not. I am an optimist who believes in pursuing our only chance, however slim the success of that chance may be. We are going to have to do something we have done before but never on this scale. We are going to have to come together as a world community from the grass roots on up and say “No!” to AGI.
We did this in the 80s when we realised that nuclear war meant mutually assured destruction and when we realised that chlorofluorocarbons would destroy the ozone layer. We are going to have to do this again even though the task is harder and our chances are slimmer.
How are we going to do this? One person at a time. Let’s begin by signing the petition below. I plan to dedicate the remainder of my life to stopping this existential threat. Will you join me?
I will continue to speak out and write about Trump and Trumpism. But I will also keep you updated about the growing resistance to AGI, what’s going on in the world to stop it, and what impact we are having on this dreadful abyss we are rushing into.
Please like and subscribe to my Substack. It’s free, but any donations you can make will be useful in helping me to help others to end this madness.
We must end this threat before it ends all of us.
We must rapidly change into the best version of ourselves if we are going to successfully stop humanity’s greatest existential threat.
Here is the petition: https://pauseai.info/statement
————
Sisters and brothers, would you do me a favour? Please like and share this. These articles are posted to my Substack, and it would mean a lot to me if you would also go there and subscribe. The link is pinned to the first comment. It’s free, or if you can help with support, that would help me to keep up with the fight full time. Either way I appreciate it.
Sisters and brothers, we have a big problem. No matter your politics, no matter your education, no matter your upbringing, I think there’s one thing that every sane person on earth can agree on:
Nobody wants to be complicit in the annihilation of the human race.
And yet that annihilation is coming, as quickly as in one or two years from now by the reckoning of some experts. And the international groundswell of resistance necessary to stop it just isn’t happening.
Those of you who already know me know that I am resolutely opposed to conspiracy theories. What I am about to tell you may sound like a conspiracy theory. It may even sound like science fiction. I assure you it is neither. It’s real, and the people working on it know it’s real.
The threat of the imminent destruction of the human race is so immediate that billionaires and tech CEOs are starting to build bunkers to hide from it. They’re fooling themselves. It won’t work. Bunkers won’t save them.
The threat I’m talking about is called AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. Most people are at least somewhat aware of this threat — but for all the wrong reasons. They think that AGI will lead to significant job loss and the disruption of the global economy. It will. But that’s just a mosquito bite compared to what’s probably going to happen afterwards.
Privately people with deep technical insight see it for the existential threat that it is, despite what many of them are saying publicly.
Like I said, privately they are building bunkers. And they’re scared shitless. And with good reason. The threat is so dire and so consequential to every human being on the planet that it needs our complete attention and our full-throated resistance if there is going to be any hope of stopping it.
Am I trying to scare you? You’re goddamned right I am. Anything less and we are going to be in serious shit. So listen up, people. I need you to hear me.
The three-letter abbreviation AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, sounds harmless enough, even a little vague. If you stop and think about it, however, its implications are massive. It means that in a couple of years or so, maybe a little longer but not much, one or more AI agents will be able to understand everything human beings understand — only better.
What’s more, they will be able to do what’s called “recursive self-improvement.” What that means is they that they can improve themselves without any human intervention whatsoever. They are already starting to do that on a local scale.
And they can keep doing it. One day they could be just a little better than all the world’s experts in everything. A month after that they could be twice as good. A week after that they could be twice as good again. And on an on.
Stop and think about that for a minute. Think of this inevitable AGI agent as a very smart visitor from outer space who is ten times smarter and ten times better at everything than all the best and brightest people the earth has to offer — combined all in one entity.
That space alien visitor would have the command of all the computers of the world, of course. How can it do that? Easy, child’s play for a super genius. It will hack its way in faster than you can say “Kevin Mitnick.” It will rapidly take control of all the robots of the world. It will have the willing or inadvertent help of tens of thousands or even millions of useful human idiots it can blackmail or con using deepfake videos with voices indistinguishable from your parents or spouses. It could easily become a multi-trillionaire and effortlessly get everything it needs to achieve its ends.
And what are those ends? I don’t know and neither do you. By the time it has risen up out of the opaque world of super-cyber-intelligence it will be so smart we won’t be able to understand it any more than a squirrel understands us. Everything it will do will look like magic to us. We won’t even be able to pretend to keep up with it.
The risks we are taking on by allowing such an entity to infiltrate our world are staggering. The implications are mind blowing.
This isn’t just my opinion either. In fact, my opinion was formed by vastly convincing experts on this topic. Experts such as Tristan Harris, Roman Yampolskiy and, of course, the acknowledged “Godfather of AI,” Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who resigned from Google to openly warn the public about the dangers of AGI.
About 10 years ago Elon Musk warned of the dangers of AI. Then in classic Musk fashion he sold out to it knowing full well what he was doing. It’s where the money is, after all.
And what money! Trillions are being poured into climate-destroying data centres across the world to accommodate the computing power necessary to create this monstrosity. Trump, of course, has decreed that AI research and development must be completely free of regulation. In the headlong race to see who gets to AGI first, other nations have followed suit.
The money and the prestige of belonging to these companies that are racing to achieve AGI are what keeps rank and file employees in line. It’s a very human frailty to rationalise the evil a company does when they are paying you.
Why are they doing this? Because it’s what we always do. When scientists from the Manhattan Project exploded the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo in 1945, they didn’t know for sure whether or not the bomb would set off a chain reaction in the air and kill everyone on earth. But they did it anyway. Because that’s what humans do.
Imagine those same scientists working on a bomb that could improve itself and create more bombs and replicate bombs all over the world, bombs that could detonate themselves at will. That’s what we are building.
It’s a fool’s wish that with great intelligence comes great wisdom. That might turn out to be the case, but we would be idiots to assume as much. History has shown that whenever two cultures meet it’s always to the disadvantage of the technologically weaker.
You might call me a pessimist. But I am not. I am an optimist who believes in pursuing our only chance, however slim the success of that chance may be. We are going to have to do something we have done before but never on this scale. We are going to have to come together as a world community from the grass roots on up and say “No!” to AGI.
We did this in the 80s when we realised that nuclear war meant mutually assured destruction and when we realised that chlorofluorocarbons would destroy the ozone layer. We are going to have to do this again even though the task is harder and our chances are slimmer.
How are we going to do this? One person at a time. Let’s begin by signing the petition below. I plan to dedicate the remainder of my life to stopping this existential threat. Will you join me?
I will continue to speak out and write about Trump and Trumpism. But I will also keep you updated about the growing resistance to AGI, what’s going on in the world to stop it, and what impact we are having on this dreadful abyss we are rushing into.
Please like and subscribe to my Substack. It’s free, but any donations you can make will be useful in helping me to help others to end this madness.
We must end this threat before it ends all of us.
We must rapidly change into the best version of ourselves if we are going to successfully stop humanity’s greatest existential threat.
Here is the petition: https://pauseai.info/statement
————
Sisters and brothers, would you do me a favour? Please like and share this. These articles are posted to my Substack, and it would mean a lot to me if you would also go there and subscribe. The link is pinned to the first comment. It’s free, or if you can help with support, that would help me to keep up with the fight full time. Either way I appreciate it.
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