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WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO SEE HUMANITY PERISH
The AI stories abound. Almost overnight it seemed, the talk was that AI was in crisis, and that any further advance of the bots meant the end of humanity.
The debates have just begun.
As first reported by Matteo Wong of The Atlantic, "Bots are starting to conspire with one another." The founder of OpenAI, the head of Anthropic, and every AI developer agree that the world faces a challenge unlike anything we have ever witnessed. And researchers believe the speed of their development is outstripping the ability to monitor them.
These are the facts coming from every quarter of the universe.
One of the scariest questions is why anyone of the right mind would want to see humanity perish.
Philip Montgomery, of The New York Times, asked Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, authors of their new book, "End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World," what they thought. They argued, "that a powerful coalition of religious fundamentalists, ethnonationalists and tech oligarchs (Elon Musk chief among them) is actively -- and successfully -- hastening the destruction of the world as we know it ... Because they believe that they're primed to thrive on the other side of catastrophe, everyone else be damned."
It may surprise most of us, but the idea of a "post-humanity," post humanity or as it is also referred to "posthumanism" is that we may eventually be transformed so profoundly--by artificial intelligence, biotechnology, genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, or other technologies--that the resulting beings would no longer be conventionally "human."
Ray Kurzweil, long a futurist and "post humanist," has predicted the concept of technological to describe a point at which technological change--particularly machine intelligence--becomes extraordinarily rapid and transformative.
Household figures like Elon Musk, the head of OpenAI, Sam Altman, even the founder of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, have expressed ideas in which AI could compress decades of biological and medical progress into a much shorter period. While not explicitly posthumanism, radical thinking of a future like posthumanism or transhumanist ideas are obvious.
Many high-tech billionaires are already building underground estates or bunkers as insurance against an apocalypse. One of the most lavish, according to Wired Magazine, is the Zukerberg compound on the island of Kauai, Hawaii, which includes a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker and multiple luxurious amenities. estimated to be worth over $300 million.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO warns that the makers of artificial intelligence "owe it to humanity to try" to slow down. His recent essay, 20,000 words long titled "The Adolescence of Technology, was posted in Fortune Magazine, ". In it he proposed:
1. Each frontier AI company commits to giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators (such as METR), whose role is to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes.
2. Frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress. Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging and will require government support.
3. The US and other democratic governments attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.
The stakes are too high, he argued, for pacing to be an empty exercise -- we need to use the time it gives us wisely.
A little hope to hang onto.
John Eger is a professor emeritus at San Diego State University's School of Journalism and Media Studies. He served as telecommunications advisor to the President and as legal counsel to the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission.
