Courtesy of wikipedia.org
Donald Trump, our 47th President, has been criticized for starting the Iran war with no clear objective. That may be true. But Trump isn’t the only one capable of acting with no glimmer of an outcome. Al developers, driven by profit motives, have not given the technology’s future much consideration, either. As a consequence, Congress seems helpless to legislate for positive social direction.
A few billionaires who hope to become trillionaires have tried to peek behind the curtain of AI’s future. Some paint rosy pictures of medical and scientific discoveries. Others predict that unemployment rates will disrupt our economy. Still others focus on perfecting instruments of war.
Peter Thiel is among the last. The billionaire founder of the AI giant Palantir has written a manifesto for the future that should frighten anyone. He calls for the conscription of every child born in the country, and declares that multiculturalism has no place in the future:
…certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive, and harmful.
Anyone of sound mind should question where this new technology is taking us. Even MAGA folks express concerns. Steve Bannon, a Trump advisor, is prominent among them. He insists that AI models should receive mandatory testing and government approval.
The request is reasonable. Other industries submit to government regulation. AI, with its threat of massive unemployment, should be no exception. History shows us that new industries create new opportunities, as they did during the Industrial Revolution, when people abandoned their plows for assembly lines. Nonetheless, AI is different.
A technology that can adapt and program itself may not need human intervention. Even mathematical geniuses could one day find themselves without a future. Meanwhile, the government would be reduced to doling out unemployment checks to the population.
Endless leisure may take getting used to. Other activities might emerge. What kind, I can only guess. But humans are adaptive. If leisure were the only challenge ahead, the species would survive. AI’s effect upon Nature is the question, however. So far, it has tolerated our plundering of natural resources. But climate change signals that tolerance is coming to an end. For 2026, scientists predict unprecedented droughts, large enough to endanger all aspects of life. When a river begins to shrink, the impacts can spread quickly: less water for crops, more pressure on households, and deeper instability for communities already dealing with extreme heat and conflict.
Heedless of this fact, a handful of U.S. billionaires are racing to build data centers to support a growing AI industry. Data centers require huge amounts of water to operate. During a worldwide drought, where do these titans of industry go to find it? Unlike China, which has opened its first oceanic processing center powered by wind, we chose to build on land.
Even if AI could solve the drought problem, would it bother? A non-carbon entity capable of programming itself might want to pursue other issues, particularly if it became sentient, as some have predicted.
Men with no greater vision than seeking profit shouldn’t remain at the helm of this new technology. Mankind has too much at stake. We’d do better to heed the words of a scientist rather than entrepreneurs. Stephen Hawking had a passing understanding of the universe. Before he died, he issued this warning.
The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded. (told to the BBC)
*Listen to a summary of the Pope’s encyclical on AI and learn about Anthropic’s co-founder, Christopher Olah’s, role in the presentation. (29 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYSjnALg2bI
BOYCOTT: Tesla, Apple, Amazon
