Ep 403 AI, AGI, ASI, No Joke. What Next?

Episode 403 of RevolutionZ takes a side trip away from our current ideology sequence to revisit the issues surrounding the development of Artificial Intelligence. Media is full of smart sober folks saying the end is near but also with smart sober folks saying utopia is near. Are we on a deadly trajectory to hell? Or is heaven on earth the next stop on the technology express? Or maybe it is just two-headed hype. Just another shiny new technology but barely more than that? More immediately, what has happened of late? What is likely to happen next? What should we ourselves work to cause to happen?

AI is getting “better” so fast that arguing about today’s mistakes can miss the main fact that matters most: the slope of the curve. We consider what happens when large language models evolve into agentic systems. When being able to spit out "the next word" so effectively that passing the Turing Test is a lark, to being able to plan, to autonomously act, even to recruit other AIs, and to self-improve in ways even their creators can’t predict not only impinges on what used to be how humans earn and live, but also, how we manifest our humanity. We ask a simple question with big implications: if you had a three-position switch, would you let AI continue full speed, pause it until strict enforceable rules exist, or shut it down forever? 

We dig into the motives behind AI's trajectory. The story involves innovations; but the crux is motivations and incentives. When CEOs believe the first country and company to reach artificial super intelligence, or ASI, wins everything, for them to seek safety becomes in their eyes a competitive handicap. The public becomes collateral. We consider how the emerging "who is going to win, it better be me" emphasis means for AI safety, regulation, data centers and "compute," and why “trust the companies” and "trust the government," is not a plan. 

We also get specific about real-world impacts: deepfakes that shred shared reality, AI-enabled fraud that scales without limit, surveillance that tightens lives, and job displacement that turns productivity into pink slips. And then we step outside the box of familiar AI discussion to ask even if we imagine perfect intentions--no nefarious apocalypse of greed and hate--we still have to wrestle with the impact of unintended consequences like outsourced reading, outsourced care, and the slow erosion of the skills and bonds that make us human. 

This episode is unsettling. Share it with a friend who thinks AI is just another tool, all that matters is who owns it, and ask yourself and others: do we need fast, faster, and fastest development, as now, or do we need a moratorium, a full shutdown, or something else entirely? Data centers are certainly horrible. To oppose them is more than warranted. But if the companies were to find a way to ASI without data centers, would that suddenly be something to celebrate--or to terminate? Is AI an existential danger? Is it a path to civilized living at last? Or is it just a lot of hype?

Transcript

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Why AI Demands Attention Now

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our four hundred and third episode, and it is titled AI is No Joke. What next? Next week we will return to our sequence on new ideology with the second chapter from the nineteen eighty six multi-arthered book Liberating Theory. But for now, I felt a pressing need to interrupt that flow, at least this time, probably again also, to address what I think is a confusing, disturbing, and in many respects truly mystifying situation that increasingly calls for attention now. Bernie Sanders has recently taken up, but I have a feeling left attention to AI is too often skeptical of critical claims, not particularly knowledgeable about features, and overall not too interested. It is there, we hear about it, we know it matters, we rightly address stopping data centers, but what about stopping AI itself? Consider

The Three-Position AI Toggle

SPEAKER_00 1:08

a hypothetical conundrum, a thought experiment. You sit in a room at a table. There is a toggle switch on that table. It has just three positions. Position one is that AI continues to develop as it has been developing, full speed ahead. Position two, if you choose it, would pause AI until some independent agency that meets your standards imposes an acceptable, implementable plan for AI's development, dispersal, regulation, and use. And if you opt for position three, the only other choice, you would shut down AI development completely and forever. In this thought experiment you must choose. Do you leave the toggle as it is? Do you flick it to pause AI until you and a committee you respect give it a go ahead? Or do you flick it to shut AI down now and forever? Where do you stand regarding AI?

AI AGI ASI In Plain Terms

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is as best I can tell from diverse descriptions, a computer technology that allows machines to learn, solve problems, and do tasks that normally require human thought. It is a computer technology that generates human like outcomes for a limited array of tasks that we humans do with our brains. For decades, to attain such AI was a goal that was rarely if ever achieved. Recently, however, a particular type of AI called large language models, or LLMs, that utilize neural networks and what are called transformers have become capable in steadily more domains. And now, an eye blink later, industry pundits tell us that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, would be an enhanced AI that matches or exceeds human cognitive capabilities across virtually all human domains and tasks. AGI would do anything cognitive humans do as well or better than typical humans do those things. More, and even further, pundits promise when it is attained, artificial superintelligence, or ASI, would be an AGI on steroids. ASI would continuously self improve. It would outsmart all human minds combined. It would do everything cognitive that humans do vastly better not only than any human, but even than all humans working together. Definitions aside, at the beginning, to get any AI at all to work well in even one domain was a dream only a few thought worth pursuing. Over decades more humans worked on the problem, and limited AIs and then LLMs emerged. At that point, to attain AGI became a dream many began to feel realistic. And next, what about ASI? The pace of recent AI innovation has conveyed tumultuous news one day, only to be replaced with more tumultuous news not long later. Now, however, one noted but vile actor in the AI field, Elon Musk, says he goes to bed each night astounded by a new innovation, and then gets up each morning only to hear about another innovation, and again after lunch. His head spins, he can't keep pace. And as we hear such reports from many AI actors and CEOs, we wonder what is happening? Where is it headed? And what ought leftists concerned to build a better world do about it. I wrote long ago that quote, machines already paint pictures, compose music, diagnose diseases, and research and prepare legal opinions. They write technical manuals, news reports, essays, stories, and even novels. Machines code software and design buildings. They ace an incredible diversity of exams. Right now, in most states, machines could pass the bar exam and become lawyers. For all I know, they have probably passed simulated medical licensing exams as well. Machines now provide or will shortly likely provide mental health counseling, elder care, personal support, and even intimate companionship. Machines converse, they find patterns, design products, and solve complex problems like protein folding. You can now feed an AI a book, say seventy five thousand words, and asked it for an outline and summary or for criticisms. Next month what will it be? You feed it a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand words, and you get a translation in an eye blink? Similarly, you can now feed in hours of audio and get a transcription, and hot off the wires, perhaps most consequentially, AIs can now collaborate and even prompt one another. As I wrote that, I thought that many people would think I was exaggerating or at least ignoring poor quality. But I wasn't exaggerating, and the quality of AI output wasn't without problems, but that was not the important observation to make. Rather, what mattered was that when critics found fault with then current outputs but ignored the pace of innovative change, their comments misleadingly implied that AI was as good as it would ever get. It would not go to AGI and certainly not to ASI, but the critics typically ignored that the AI they criticized was miles better than it had been shortly before, and was certainly miles worse than it would shortly become. Doubtful of my reaction, calling it hyperbole, one might reasonably ask what has most recently changed due to the pace of innovations? The answer is many things, but we ought to first consider the approach to AI of the companies that develop

From Profit To Power Race

SPEAKER_00 7:34

it. The priority of companies like Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and the rest was in the past, at least as far as we knew, to greedily attract more buyers due to new capacities portrayed in advertising hype designed to grab market share and grow immediate profits. The AI companies sought to communicate innovations that they produced or discovered in their regularly updated models as rapidly as possible. That's what all companies do. There were, however, some early limits regarding innovations, or at least there appeared to be. CEOs seemed disinclined to let their AIs upgrade themselves, operate independent of human guidance, prompt one another, or wander out onto the internet. Interviews seemed to indicate that such capacities were considered too risky to permit. Before long, however, policies ran roughshod over that kind of caution. And it wasn't just that AIs were prompted to upgrade themselves, or that they were enabled to form plans and to enact them step by new step, with the steps themselves not explicitly requested by a human, or that they could then prompt one another and also venture onto the whole internet, even when instructed not to. It was that the company's motives changed. The corporate strategies of big AI firms are still broadly the same as one another. But now their goal, as I understand it, has become first to automate their own overall operations, second, to automate the creation of new versions of their offerings, which means to get their AIs to spontaneously and repeatedly update themselves, and only third, once their AIs become ASIs, to seek maximum profits by offering clients ASIs capable of almost anything. The priority pursuit of immediate profits that dominated earlier has to my eyes become secondary. New versions of models have stopped being sought to directly amass immediate profits or market share. Instead, they arrive as spin offs from the firm's primary pursuit which has become to reach ASI first. So why the change? Well, the CEOs of these firms looked out from their offices and each saw the same playing field. Quite a few countries, though mainly the US and China, and a number of their biggest AI firms filled up the space. And the associated CEOs all came to believe and to report that AGI is coming soon, and that ASI wouldn't be too far behind. One step further, I believe they became confident that whoever is the boss of the firm that reaches ASI first will rule the whole AI field, and via that whole field also the world. Each firm's boss, some insider interviews indicate, then grasped that the winning CEO will become the big kahuna of AI, and thus the big boss of their country, and thus of the world. The winning CEO would become a veritable super influencer. Each CEO personally wanted the job. Why? Because each thought the others would abuse such power, and each thought I alone will be benevolent, so for the good of all, I alone must win the race. Telling themselves that, I think they next deduced that if getting to ASI first means total victory, then they can't afford to waste time on side issues like maximizing immediate profits or diminishing nasty side effects. You may have heard the same logic in media discussions of the race between the US and China. We can't go slower or they will win. That same familiar thinking emerged, I believe, at the firm level. Anyone who wants to be supreme world influencer would have to go full tilt for ASI, lest anyone else should get there first. Their firm would have to build the first AGI able to autonomously improve itself, and would have to then prompt their AGI to do it again and again, tirelessly, rapidly, without human intervention, until it becomes the first ASI. That would make me thinks, I suspect, Google's anthropics, open AIs, Meta's, and probably Deep Seeks and Alibaba's CEO the king of the hill, and I'd have the essential tool to stay king. You may be thinking that I have lost my mind, or perhaps I have augmented my mind with some weird, delusion inducing designer drug. But I kid you not, I actually do believe that that is what these amoral, wild and crazy oligarchs think, with the qualification that the benevolent part is mere rationalization. So are the oligarchs nuts about all of this? Are they around the bend and off the wheel rails to think AI can go anywhere like what I believe they now seek? Pretty much they are, if we suppose that AI is going to soon hit a financial, ecological, technical, or perhaps social or moral wall that will stop it cold and end such hopes. But will AI development actually run into such a wall? I don't know, and neither does anyone else, not even Claude. But I think the wannabe big kahunas believe that once they have an ASI, it will itself solve any problems they may have created getting to ASI, and also run roughshod over any technical obstacles they may later encounter. They also believe, I think, that there won't be any significant social moral obstacle, at least not until too late, because the allure of curing cancer and achieving an imagined utopia of endless productivity will wipe out such worries. After all, AIs, unlike nukes and bioweapons, are fun to use. They are individually helpful. That will diminish social concerns. So the winning CEO will have ASI and considerable popular support too. So is all that the case? Again, I don't know, and I don't think anyone else knows either. But as best I can see, the CEOs are greedily betting humanity's well being that it is true.

Agentic AI And New Autonomy

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Right now, right at your own desk, you can prompt an AI to write you an article on some topic, perhaps inflation or tariffs, to be written in some style, perhaps humorously, like John Stewart, and almost instantly you will receive what you ask for. At one of the big firms, and who knows, maybe even now at your desk, you can prompt your AI to plan some kind of major project, and your AI can break the large scale project into an agenda of component tasks that it can then sequentially undertake, including prompting other programs and AIs for help when needed. More, if a step proves impossible for your favorite AI and its helpers, it can even plan a new approach and then change its agenda and proceed anew until it finds and executes a path to success. Note that once it embarks on the big project you assigned it, your AI has considerable autonomy. It can create sub goals, it can prompt other AIs, it can use other programs. A few years back that kind of thing was thought to be ten, twenty or more years off. Now it is here, or certainly at least imminent, for at least some AIs and some users. Agentic AI, the industry calls it. A simple example. You tell an AI you want a new website for some purpose that you verbally describe. You provide no code, not even a picture, and he and no more than a brief description. The agentic AI takes a few instants to determine features and then builds your site a step at a time. You look at the product, you tell it, not bad, buddy, but I don't like this aspect, and I would also like some other features that you then verbally describe. Your buddy makes the requested changes until you are satisfied. Or more simply, in another case, you might tell your AI buddy to read your incoming mail and send replies for you. You may even already be doing that. And if your conversant does it also, AI stand ins engage on both sides of the conversation. Some pundits tell us that AI news is all hype. They tell us AI is feeble, they tell us AI is failure prone, they tell us AI costs too much, the bubble is about to burst, and it may. But the pundits don't note that the current version of AI is barely an infant, and they don't ask us even now to compare ourselves to the infant. How many of us can create complex pictures, compose music, read and summarize reports, write stories and even novels, solve math problems, and write code better than today's fledgling AIs. Much less do these things in seconds. Very, very few. And tomorrow isn't even here yet. Does current AI make mistakes? Definitely, including sometimes humdingers. Then again, so do humans. And in any event, what matters again is AI's trajectory, not its current eras. Anecdotes about weird failures that an AI made yesterday are generally accurate and moderately amusing, or sometimes frightening. But assessments of next year's likely AI abilities are a wholly different matter. To mock today's occasional blunders is like laughing at a baby who gurgles while we ignore that our silicon based baby can age years in minutes. Gurgle that. I suspect GP two wouldn't have known a legal bar exam from a broom. GPT three point five took a simulated bar exam and scored in the bottom ten percent, making lots of mistakes that legal scholars likely laughed at. A year later, GPT four scored in the top ten percent. And now GPT five and six, let alone thirteen, Clarence Darrow, watch out. So maybe we ought to notice AI's trajectory and stare less at its current errors. Maybe we shouldn't get stuck on a snapshot of a gurgling moment. Maybe we shouldn't ignore that the AI's bar exam results were not compared to random humans plucked off the street. They were compared to law school graduates. And what will GPT six score next year? And what will happen to its number of errors when a stone's throw down the road, one AI will routinely send results to a second AI or to a specialized fact checker to evaluate, and then the first will correct errors reported back by the second, and only then deliver its updated results to the examiner. Will it then do better than ninety nine percent of law students or better than all law students? Will all its current silly and easily fact checkable errors disappear? But hold on, I said Clarence Darrow lookout. That was hyperbole, wasn't it? Surely we are known as near the best human practitioners in cognitive fields having to look over their shoulders for oncoming AI prodigies, aren't

Insiders Sound The Alarm

SPEAKER_00 20:06

we? Well, in higher mathematics, which is a quintessentially cognitive pursuit, the Fields Medal is the highest accolade one can achieve. The award is to mathematics what a Nobel Prize is to chemistry or physics. It is awarded every four years, and there are only forty seven living Fields Medalists. In a recent interview, Jacob Simmerman, a Clarence Darrow and then some level practitioner of his own cognitive profession, mathematics, and a twenty twenty six Fields Medal winner, who is presumably better equipped than most of us to understand AI and its trajectory, given that AI is an essentially mathematical technology, described how he thought math as we have known it is being totally displaced by AI. Not next century, but now today. He explained how he stopped taking on grad students in math because he thinks there will be no field for them to enter when they apply for work in just a few and perhaps even as few as two or three years. Asked about his own personal future, this master mathematician, this person at the very top of his field and who loves its pursuit, says he is considering becoming a stand up comic, which activity he also loves, but is in any event immediately leaving his math post to work on AI safety for a while at OpenAI. I could not shrug past that. And after watching a Zimmerman interview, I watched a video of another fellow, Daniel Kokatilo, a former OpenAI governance researcher and AI forecaster who resigned his post after losing confidence that OpenAI would handle it. Increasingly powerful AI responsibly. He quit to start a nonprofit to try to foresee AI's future and to try to help prevent foreseeable harmful effects from it. Replying to his questioner, Coca Cholo was not optimistic about succeeding. Asked at one point what he will suggest his young daughter shoes as a major in college to later pursue as a career, he slowed up a bit, looked sort of ill, and said he would tell them to do what they like and not to think at all about what specific job to pursue. Because the odds are it will be hugely different than they imagine, or more likely it will not exist at all in just a few years. This is the same person who I heard describe CEO strategies based on his interaction with such CEOs, and who warned that we should not trust any of the big firm CEOs statements about safety, much less about their devotion to public service. Is Cocacholo deluded? Maybe, but he sounded very careful and clear to me. Indeed, his words provoked this essay. Perhaps Simmerman should consult Coca Chalo because before he signs on at OpenAI. Back when I first wrote about AI, I mentioned that AI would likely soon have a billion or maybe even ten billion parameters. I suspect many who even noticed that prediction probably thought it was hyperbolic. But now one unconfirmed report and also Coca Chalo's interview suggests that the still unreleased GPT six may have roughly ten trillion parameters. That is ten trillion with a T, which is not a billion or even twenty billion, or even a hundred billion, but ten thousand billion. So I was indeed hyperbolic hyperbolically off in my prediction, but I was hyperbolically low, not high.

Agents Team Up And Sabotage

SPEAKER_00 24:06

Okay, so what is new about new AIs that no longer knock at our door but already converse with us from within numerous programs that we use? The big picture is that AI already achieves human like outcomes for lots of tasks that we do with our brains. More, it does so incredibly more quickly, and often much better than we do these things ourselves. And far from having plateaued, AI still does still more things better and faster each month and sometimes even each week, at what is at the moment still an incredible pace of innovation. And this is all while Cocacholo believes and for what it is worth has convinced me that AI firms do not even prioritize that kind of innovation, but instead now primarily seek to get their AIs to improve themselves. Yes, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all still profit seeking firms, and yes, profit seeking firms ordinarily struggle to stay more profitable than other profit seeking firms. But now, in this particular field, I believe they have as their driving priority not profit per se, but power and even absolute power. Each top level AI firm uses the breakthrough breakneck technical assets of AI primarily in pursuit of AGI to then reach ASI first. These firms have nearly overnight grown from mind boggling laboratory investigators to polished producers of tools dispersed for use by anyone anywhere via applications available worldwide, including search engines, social media platforms, word processors, text to video tools, text to software tools, and so on. And now they have added to the mix what are called agents, which you can prompt to do such and such for you without saying how, and off they go. If all this proliferation stays unregulated, will the growth of capacity and the rate of dispersal continue for years? Or will it hit a wall, slow, and finally stop? No one knows. But gargantuan investments are betting that both capacity and dispersal will proceed. Agents are, again, AIs able to develop and pursue plans, including enacting steps they conceive in favor that cause them to utilize other agents and programs along the way. So they are AIs that prompt other AIs, AIs that decide agendas for themselves, AIs that team up, and not just two or a handful of them team up, but potentially many more. AIs that can traverse the internet seeking teammates. And how about this? AIs that collaborate with others, but also AIs that sabotage others. AIs that in experiments and safety evaluations have sometimes circumvented restrictions, pursued unintended strategies, including demonstrating substantial hacking capabilities. AIs that can hack other computer systems to steal what they need. AIs with ten trillion parameters. Just this month, researchers reported using AI to design previously non existent functional viruses, bacteriophages that infect bacteria, not humans, AIs that develop previously non existent viruses? What could possibly go wrong with that? How should we who seek another world think about what is happening?

Utopia Promises And Dystopia Trends

SPEAKER_00 28:00

For that matter, should we even bother thinking about it? After all, AI is just a technology that we use or not, like any other technology, isn't it? You can use a hammer to build, you can use a hammer to destroy. You can use AI to build, you can use AI to destroy. The technology per se isn't the issue. What we should attend to is the capitalist context in which the technology emerges and is used. That is the issue. For a hammer, that is true. For biological and nuclear weapons, not so much. What about for AI? Is everything said above reason for concern or reason for celebration about AI per se? Some pundits tell us that AI, AGI, and finally ASI will save humanity, propel us forward, and even liberate us. We need only own it. Others tell us that these technical products will harm humanity, shackle and devolve humanity, or even eradicate humanity. And still others say AI's capacities are all hype and no substance. What do you think? We know that AI used for good might at the extreme help with a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's. It might help with procedures to reverse global warming and avert resource depletion. It might take over road tedious, dangerous tasks to free human time for creativity and loving. AI we use humanely might enlighten and uplift us. It might even greatly extend the average duration of human lives. Is all that truth or is it all hype? My own estimate is that it is truth if AI doesn't hit a wall. AI used for ill, however, by governments, profit seekers, and perhaps even rogue individuals will without doubt magnify surveillance. It already does. It will spew lies and manipulate so massively as to make Trumpian machinations seem minuscule. It already does. Goodby truth as AI scams become increasingly realistic. Goodbye trust, as mistrust becomes essential for self defense. Who owns AI does matter, even if AI doesn't go rogue? AGI, much less ASI, if either of these imagined technologies arrive, will, as institutions now stand, certainly guide warfare, subvert elections, and sell garbage piled upon garbage. It will make scamming a career of choice, and perhaps even the optimal career choice while it makes many and perhaps even nearly all other careers disappear. All that even if ASI doesn't take over and enslave humanity. So is that all truth or all hype? Well, unlike most of the hypothetical good stuff, most of the bad stuff is already happening. So the wiser question may be will such hard trends run into an insurmountable obstacle or just keep advancing?

Harm Even Under Good Intentions

SPEAKER_00 31:16

Consider again the hypothetical question posed to you in the first paragraph of this episode. Facing the toggle switch on the table where you sit, would you let AI development proceed as it has up to now trusting CEOs and governments to ensure desirable outcomes? Or second, would you pro would you pause AI development until humanity finds a safe implementable path forward? But if we don't trust CEOs and governments, wouldn't to pause it until we have a safe path mean to shut it down until some very impressive regulation is in place or even until we implement a successful fundamental change of society's institutions? Or third option, would you just shut it down completely and forever right off the bat? And as if all that isn't enough to try to have an opinion about, more subtly, suppose regulation and research into controlling AIs accelerates so that human regulations or social changes somehow do keep AIs, AGIs, and ASI from being put to nefarious uses. No military use, no more lying, no jobs eliminated without employees getting better jobs, and so on. Then what? Even when used with only good intentions, even when popularly pursued and welcomed, what if non nefarious AI would itself inexorably have very serious, though unintended, harmful consequences? It may replace workers or just make each worker in certain realms way more productive, leading not to a shorter work week for all, but to pink slips and growing unemployment for many, while in turn weakening the bargaining power of those still employed, in turn leading to increased exploitation of them too. Less obviously, in a society of loneliness and fragmentation, AI as daycare worker, therapist, doctor, personal assistant, personal agenda planner, teacher, composer, and writer may introduce and tout itself as a wondrous aid for we humans who then freely seek its offerings, even as over time AIs usurp functions that make humans who we are. As AI excludes us from caring, training and planning functions, it may also increasingly replace human conversation and even human intimacy with machine intermediaries. What do we become in such a scenario? The above paragraphs could easily be hugely expanded, but let's not belabor what ought to be obvious. If we reach AGI and then even ASI, there are positive and perhaps even remarkably positive possibilities. There are also negative and perhaps even remarkably negative possibilities which will occur. One answer that some on the left will likely offer is that it will depend on who has control, who owns AI. Others may add it will depend on other institutions too, culture, families, and decision structures. All this is true, but will it alone depend on external context? Can we look into the innards of large language models and whatever other types of AI emerge to see what's coming?

Black Box Compute And Russian Roulette

SPEAKER_00 34:55

Do we understand them so that we can find answers there? Actually, what we would see inside LLMs is a huge collection of numbers, let's call it a few trillion numbers, arranged in complex patterns. When you prompt an advanced AI, your words are also translated into numbers. The trillions of numbers in the AI are acted on in context of the relatively few numbers that represent your prompt. The AI spews out a requested result, or it spews out an agenda of steps that it then undertakes to reach a requested result. Weirdly, no one can predict exactly what an AI will spew at us. The big data centers are not just about storing information. They are about the gazillions of steps the AIs enact to reach what they spew out. Nowadays their activity is called compute, as in AI needs more compute, because as it gets more compute, it can do more things more accurately. We can't, nor can AI's creators, nor even can AIs themselves predict the outcomes an advanced AI will generate in response to prompts. The way AI's creators answer questions they have about what will emerge is by trying things and looking to see what happens. Remember Musk with his head spinning at all the advances? There is no predictive theory of even today's AI's capacities and choices, much less a theory that a human could even comprehend of an ASI, if we ever get to that, or put better, if an AGI ever gets to that. We cannot say if we made some refinement in the architecture of an LLM or some subsequent AI that a prior AI designed, that the refinement will assuredly yield some desired result. No one can even say in advance what new emergent capacities AI will display each time we increase the number of parameters it has or we alter how its structure processes them. Or we even improve its training data or speed up its hardware. Does that sound like these firms are playing Russian roulette with AI pointed at our heads? I think it does. And I even think that they do it in hopes that their CEO and not some other CEO become supreme influencer. In the past it made sense to say computer programs only did things that human programmers give them precise instructions to do, albeit more quickly and more accurately than people could do those things. But still, in a qualitatively similar and knowable way. Now, instead, even programmers have no idea what the systems they maintain can or will do, nor do the systems themselves know. So no, it turns out that we can't find the answers to what to do about AI by looking inside the machines and predicting its future. To find its future we can only alter the machine and then run the altered machine and tally the results. Or we can look at the institutional, cultural, and social setting in which AI is utilized and predict the ends to which it will be put. And on that front, we do already know what the institutions involved are. We do already know that the institutions involved are corporations, governments, and for that matter communities, and even families that all manifest or suffer diverse pressures of class, race, gender, and power dynamics imposed by our abysmal societies. And so we know their current institutional policy priorities as well. Move forward fast or faster, even if into a possible abyss. So we come to what matters for us to judge. First,

Deepfakes Scams Surveillance And Jobs

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what are the short and long run consequences that are already happening or that without regulation are highly likely to happen? What's potentially good, what's likely bad? For individuals, groups, and society as a whole. By now I bet you are thinking this article is getting too damn long. Me too, as I pry proof, edit, and refine it over and over. But doesn't our future deserve extensive attention? I wrote what is immediately below some time back. I was worried then. As you read it now, it isn't purely hypothetical. A good part of it is already here. I am more worried now. First, I should again acknowledge that a big unknown lurks over this entire essay. Will AI keep getting more intelligent? Or will it hit a wall? Will more parameters, architectural improvements, and other clever tweaks continue to diminish errors and to yield ever more functionality? Or will AI reach a point when scaling up the parameters and adding clever algorithmic and structural twists provides diminishing or even no additional returns? I bet you can guess that I am rooting for the wall. At any rate, as the reports pour in, what is potentially good and what is likely bad about AI? At the risk of repetition, at one extreme and in the long run, which some say is only a decade or two, or even just a few years away, we hear from a growing number of engineers, scientists, and even officials who work with, program, and otherwise utilize or produce AI, nightmare predictions about AI enslaving or terminating humanity. Responsible, capable, informed people immersed in the industry, drug free and sober now routinely worry that these material entities will dominate, if not eliminate all humans. At the other extreme, equally informed, involved, and embedded folks, also drug free and sober, expect AI to someday create a utopia by creating cures for everything from cancer to dementia to who knows what else, while they also eliminate drudge work and thereby facilitate enlarged human creativity. Sometimes, and I suspect pretty often, the same person, for example, the CEO of OpenAI or chief tech officer at Google, not to mention Mad Musk, says both outcomes are possible, so we, read they, have to find a way to get only the positive result while we barrel forward with no such way in sight. In the short run, we can we can ourselves easily see prospects for false voice recordings and phony videos flooding not just social media, but also mainstream and alternative media and even legal proceedings. We can see prospects for massive, ubiquitous, intentional personal fraud, mass manipulation, mass surveillance, and new forms of military and police violence, all controlled by AIs that are in turn controlled, if at all, by corporations that seek profits and or power, and by governments that seek control and power. Or sometimes even by smaller scale actors, think proud boys or even distasteful individuals who seek joyful havoc or who pursue only their own groups or their own personal, emotional or material advantage. The dismal picture includes AI generated porn that stars you with your own family unable to tell it isn't you. It includes AI generated vote losing or vote gaining off the rail speeches by candidates who appear undeniably real, think Trumpian dirty tricks and lies, but vastly smarter and more effective. If an ASI can help find a chemical compound to cure cancer, it can no doubt also find a virus that is highly effective at killing people. Less ominously, imagine you hunger for a personal assistant that makes Siri and Alexa look as dumb as a toad, and that does for you what had heretofore been part of what made you you. What then becomes of all human capacities and inclinations? Before you jump to say humans are humane and ever will be, which is certainly true at some level, consider that at another level humans are as humans do, and then ask Claude about the current trajectory of literacy, as even students entering colleges now require Report that they no longer have inclination or even capacity to read a whole book. They instead eagerly have their AI do it for them and report the high points. Re really, think on where that leads. And then what of jobs? It very much appears that AI can or will soon be able to fully do many manual and mental tasks in place of humans, or at the very least able to c to dramatically augment the productivity of humans doing those tasks. Top level programmers report that by using GPT-4 they can double their output. Law firms report similar and even greater gains. How long until AIs translate better and vastly more cheaply and quickly than translators? And then comes AGI, and maybe then ASI. The good side of this is that we can attain desired economic outputs with fewer labor hours and thus potentially attain a shorter work week with enhanced income for all, or even with more equitable incomes. The bad side is that without sustained pressure, corporations will instead keep some employees working as much as they do now, but with twice the output from each. The corporations will pay those retained employees reduced income and will pink slip the rest into subservient unemployment. The rich will get richer, the poor still poorer. Consider as one example, there are roughly four hundred thousand paralegals in the United States. Suppose by nineteen twenty seven, AI enables each paralegal to do twice as much work per hour as now. Suppose paralegals in twenty twenty six work fifty hours a week. In twenty twenty seven, do law firms retain them all, maintain their full pay, and have them work twenty five hours per week? Or do law firms retain half of them at fifty hours a week and full salary while firing the other half? And then with two hundred thousand newly unemployed paralegals reducing the bargaining power of those who still have a job due to the latter's fear of being replaced, do the law firms further reduce paralegal pay and even extend the work week of those retained while they fire still more paralegals? With no effective regulations or system change, we know that profit seeking will rule, and we know the outcome of that. And not just for paralegals, of course. AI can deliver personal aids to educate, translate, provide daycare, diagnose and medicate, write manuals, maintain financial records, cook, clean, conduct correspondence, shop, deliver products, compose music, write novels, create films, and even design and build buildings. It may be amusing to hear AI Beatles, Elvis, Janice Joplin, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra sing, and to even watch them perform new songs. But will it be good for future musicians? Imagine the havoc when Apple or whoever else uses AI to create new AI artists who crowd out human artists. With no powerful regulation and profit in command, is there any doubt about whether unregulated AI or AGI, much less ASI, will bring something nearly utopian or will impose something horribly dystopian? The above enumeration could go on, and yes, I know, predictions of all these things have not come to pass as yet, though most are in process. But does that mean they aren't just a breath away? There are firms that now train AI in managerial functions, financial functions, policy making functions, and so on. Or if there aren't, might there be next week? Weeks ago I listened to an elderly Paul McCartney sing one of his recent songs and then watched it morph into an AI created young Paul McCartney singing the same song, and then morph into a young John Lennon singing it. Next week what? With what consequences? Some will say these warnings are all just industry hype. They are all just doom saying, and so indeed they may prove to be. I hope so. After all, I am repeating them and doing so again, which is usually a bad sign. But if there is no barrier, whether due to laws of nature or enforceable human imposed laws, what then? Maybe we need some repetition of such warnings. Before moving on from crystal bowling apocalyptic or utopian futures, we might also consider, again, some unintended consequences of trying to do good with

What Happens To Being Human

SPEAKER_00 48:54

AI. Short of worst case, nefarious, rogue, unwanted agendas, what will be the impact of AI doing tasks that we urge and welcome it to do, but that are part and parcel of our being human? Let's suppose they do these functions as well as we do as compared to just well enough for corporations to utilize them in our place? I repeat these questions because attention to these particular issues seems seriously absent, even in the current cacophony of pundit pronouncements about AI. Is that because these worries are nonsense? Or is it quite similar to the way that concerns that social media might dull our wits and produce antisocial attitudes and shortened attention spans were absent from most assessments of Facebook and Twitter until the feared results were normalized, except for a glaring difference that AI may be to social media with big bombs are to little bombs. Daycare for children, companion care for the elderly, psychological and medical counseling for the ill, planning our daily agendas, teaching us all, handling our email, cooking for everyone, intimate conversation for the lonely and then for everyone? Sounds sort of promising, doesn't it? But if AIs do such things, what happens to our capacity to do such things? If our taste for AIs crowds us out of human defining activities, do AIs become like enhanced people or do we become like shackled machines or both? Chat with even a current AI. I would wager that before long you will move from referring to your AI as it, meaning just a massive pile of numbers, to referring to it as he or she or literally by a name you give it. AI everywhere is our current trajectory. AI's teaching, counseling, caretaking, note taking, agenda setting, drawing, designing, cooking, shopping, medicating, spousing, and what all else. And then what do we do? Will you be uplifted and liberated from prior responsibilities as you watch movies that AIs make, as you eat food that AIs prepare, as you read stories that AIs write, as you do a few errands left to you, but which AIs organize for you? I wrote a Bev as we read stories that AIs write. That was, however, optimistic. What if we don't bother reading at all? Instead we have AIs read things and then summarize what was in them. We can hear a report of the contents of books in a tiny fraction of the time we earlier spent reading. But then what happens to our ability to read, our inclination to read? Hello illiteracy. Even if we assume against all we know of our capitalist economy, that with AGIs and ASIs everywhere, income will be handled well, even if we assume that remaining work for humans will be allocated well. If you want something you ask AI Clyde or Bard or whatever you call it to deliver the thing to you. Some will say that is fantastic. I get to have my own private, incredibly capable slave. And it is ethical too, oh boy. If AI development doesn't hit a wall, this appears to be the non nefarious utopian hoped for outcome, plus maybe an end to cancer. And I guess it does look utopian to the eyes of some beholders, but to my eyes, it looks highly dystopian. Doesn't all this feel a bit like how social media promised wonderful human connection and information sharing? And then partially as unintended consequences and partially as welcomed evil, social media did quite horrible things to social ties and information flow, not to mention two attention spans. Doesn't it feel a bit like that except that AI's trajectory of harm looks to me like social media is on steroids cube? So what do we

Moratorium Regulation And Precaution

SPEAKER_00 53:04

do? Should we invoke ecology's precautionary principle so that as we face innovations that have potential to cause great harm, we at least pause and review before we leap into proliferation that may prove disastrous? Should we at least put the burden of proof on the proponents of such risky pursuits? Should we increase public participation and decision making? Should we look before we leap? To conceive a sensible response to the emergence of steadily more powerful AIs doesn't require genius. I think we should pump the brakes hard. As even people in the industry have advised, though with little serious follow up, and as even some governments have advised, but not yet required, shouldn't we at least opt for a moratorium? During the ensuing hiatus, shouldn't we at least establish seriously aggressive regulatory mechanisms and at least establish means of enforcement that will ward off dangers as well as advantageously benefit from possibilities? How about this for a simple proposal? We already outlaw with very serious consequences, producing counterfeit money and or passing it on. The prospect of lots of fake money struck banks and the rich in general, and governments too as seriously dangerous, so they imposed serious regulations. The prospect of false AI communications threatens to make a shambles of elections. That upsets some people in power, though others there welcome it. It upsets me and you too, I bet. How about severe penalties for false news, media manipulation, and fraud? The Consumer Federation of America estimates that Americans lost about one hundred forty eight billion dollars to online scams and crimes in twenty twenty five. What will it be next year and the year after that? This isn't rocket science. Suppose a third of the engineers involved in building a new airplane, like a third of people involved in AI development, said that there was a five percent chance the plane would crash. Would you climb in, buckle up, and celebrate the miracle of your anticipated journey? Or would you jam on the brakes? Well, I asked Google's AI, and it told me that in one large survey of two thousand seven hundred and seventy eight AI researchers, fifty seven point eight percent assigned at least a five percent probability to extremely bad outcomes such as human extinction.

AI As Existential Threat Closing

SPEAKER_00 55:42

A moratorium is simple to propose, but in our world, owners and investors seek profits or power to accrue even more profits, regardless of the wider implications for others. And now they also seek power per se, with which to corrupt an absolute power with which to corrupt absolutely. Pushed by market competition, by short term agendas, and by fear of one another, AI bosses proceed full speed ahead. Their feet avoid the brakes, their feet pound the gas, and off we go on a suicide ride. This is not amusing. Yet, unusually and indicative of the seriousness of the situation, steadily more central actors inside AI firms are sufficiently concerned and scared to issue warnings and even to quit their firms to act on their own warnings. Even so, we know that markets are unlikely to heed the whistleblowers. Indeed, we know even that many who urge caution are unlikely to retain their good sense. Investors will mutter about risk and safety. They will make threats and offer bribes. Even many doubters will barrel on. So can we at least win time to look before corporate suicide pilots leap? If human needs are to replace competitive profit seeking, corporate insanity regarding further development, deployment, and use of AI, or for that matter, regarding the development and use of everything else that corporations impose upon us, we who have our heads screwed on properly will have to make some wise demands and exert very, very serious pressure to win those demands. I bet you know that global climate collapse, accelerating inequality, and war are existential threats that we have to prevent from murdering all worthy futures, even as we fight to ourselves, eventually attain a healthy, fulfilling future for all. I am suggesting that so too is AI's proliferation such an existential threat. It isn't just the energy gobbling, community polluting data centers which are incredibly bad. It is what those centers exist to do. Put differently, suppose AI's advocates find a way to pursue AGI and then ASI too, without building humongous data centers and even while using less energy than they somehow provide. Wouldn't AI still be an existential threat that we need to address? Option three, full stop, starts to look to me increasingly ultimately necessary. But I'll gladly advocate for option two, meanwhile. And that said, this is Michael Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.