From today’s Times about AI, this piece headed “This Is Really Bad,” by Stephen Witt. So bad that we already know what ‘this’ is. And another the same day by Dario Amodei, the honcho at Anthropic, with ideas for making it all good: “We Must Pace the Frontier.”
Couple of centuries ago it would be about Manifest Destiny and Horace Greeley would be sending ambitious youth off to new horizons out West. Last century it was Jack Kennedy opening a ‘New Frontier.’ Now the excitement is a ten percent chance AI will destroy humanity.
But never mind — it’s manageable! ‘Global cooperation’ will save us. Dario says so.
Why is this happening? It’s because AI takes its direction from humans. Tribal animals who take their direction from expedience, the ‘morality’ of tribal warlords codified by Machiavelli and parroted by Roy Cohn. The perversity loosely referred to as ‘human ethics’.
So of course AI will destroy humanity! And ‘global cooperation’ will be a farce. Like Amodei, Altman, and Musk fantasizing about pausing their industry’s white-hot race to beat one another and the Chinese to the top. Red army ants swarming over global dysfunction, now suddenly functional and capable of good judgment.
Does anyone think this will end well who reasons with conscience? Who still values character, integrity, and independent judgment when meaning has been reduced to competition and winning at any cost. That needs only to satisfy the appetites of a wild beast that can’t tolerate limits. A predator that must have its wilderness and sees in AI its dream come true.
A paradise where truly – finally! – anything goes. Free at last, free at last! To be and do whatever we want because the world no longer has to be shared. Everyone free to make up whatever world they want. To own it, possess it, and to hell with everyone else. Hallelujah! The ultimate fantasy of madness: control over chaos. The way things aren’t, never were, and never can be. Absolute.
Why send Igor off to dig up a brain for an artificial human when Dr. Frankenstein has Artificial Intelligence?
Absolutely, artificially yours,
Dave Harrison