Courtesy of Wikipedia.org
Donald Trump’s midterm convention last week was the lollapalooza he promised. Not only did he offer a $5,000 bribe to every voter if Republicans prevailed in the midterms, but he encouraged cheating at the polls. The audience laughed, thinking he was joking.
Admittedly, Trump’s record for truth-telling isn’t good. He’s made false promises before. Remember the Doge dividend? The refund on health care? The tariff dividend? We never got those. Of course, we’d be fools to take the word of an individual impeached for inciting an insurrection.
Even so, Trump has his followers. “I like the guy,” said a man during a street interview. “
Hearing him, I paused. Did he like Trump’s record of crimes and misdemeanors? His refusal to turn over all the Epstein files? Or maybe Trump’s Iran war made him proud?
Surely, a majority of Americans are guided by higher standards than these.
If I am wrong, then Bernie Sanders is right to call for a pause on Trump’s latest flirtation with AI development. Before we create a new species, we should agree on what we want it to do. Surprisingly, some industry leaders agree with the Senator. The most optimistic among them warn there’s a 10% chance these new beings will wipe humans off the planet. Others speculate the chance is closer to 70%. More frightening, they predict the “evolution” could occur within the next three years.
AI could go rogue for many reasons. It works at lightning speed and holds the whole of human knowledge in its database. With tools like these, and without a moral compass, outcomes are unpredictable. We’ve seen how using chatbots has led to an increase in suicides. Claude, a program released in March 2023, was found to be working on bioweapons.
Despite Trump’s good opinion of himself, AI will need more than the President’s strong and smart guardrails for ethical guidance. If we are honest, his guardrails might increase corruption. I shudder to think about an authoritarian government with the power to create dossiers on everyone in the country. The contents could include employment material, social media comments, health records, shopping habits, travel plans, voting history, and other bits of data that would invade personal privacy.
On the other hand, AI holds much promise. With it, we could affect climate change, cure cancer, and advance the ambitions of our better angels. Perhaps that is already happening. If industry leaders like Dario Amodei are willing to put their profit ambitions on hold, in deference to humanity, that is a good thing, and we should join hands with them.
History shows that our species can overcome its baser instincts. We’ve worked together to avoid a nuclear winter. Cloning never led to harvesting human organs, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s nightmare, Never Let Me Go, remains a fiction.
We beings needn’t sell ourselves short. We have enough smarts to control our destiny. For example, researchers have discovered that dendrites, the many branches stemming from our neurons, aren’t merely conduits to other neurons. They, too, have computing power.
Bound in a nutshell, our brains have shown us the wonders of the universe. AI could expand that knowledge. But unlike bots, we are more than a numerical series of zeros and ones. We have a spiritual side and a conscience, Nature’s gifts to us. Out of respect for ourselves, we should put the new technology–possibly a new species–on pause until we have a plan.
BOYCOTT: Tesla, Apple, Amazon
