A Brave New World Is At Our Doorstep

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A Brave New World Is At Our Doorstep

https://archive.is/qIwgh

The move toward a highly technological and highly militarized society is here and it is not going away.  The Tech Bros (Google, Meta, Amazon, DeepMind, OpenAI and many others we don't even know about) have delivered humanity into a world where we are going to be redundant.  And by redundant I mean everything from doing plumbing to needing humans for anything.  

A few of the queries I am investigating this day are: 

• What is going to happen to vast swaths of this redundant humanity? 
• Who is controlling the A.I. ?  And under this question are so many more sub questions such as: 
  • Where does the information come from to train this A.I.
  • What biases are written into the code?  
  • Where is the A.I. farm?  Trump has declared it will be in the UAE.  Is that to bypass regulations? 
  • How will A.I. be powered? Are there more nuclear plants in our future? Who will regulate that pollution? 
• Apart from robots taking jobs, will the robots also find novel ways to kill?
  • This dystopian future has already been deployed in Gaza and Ukraine with assasination drones and we don't even know what comes next. 
  • Autonomous killing is already on the drawing board because humans can't make decisions in a nanosecond. 
  • Musk has already used his Starlink to manipulate info in war zones.  What is to stop an oligarch from starting a war or deciding (in his interest) who should win?  Ukraine is a perfect example of this. 
• What about the "good side" of A.I.? 
  • Some point to better design, new drugs, and lower costs for everything and lots more stuff and money -- but we know that more economic activity leads to environmental destruction.  Under the old system we were burning the world up.  What happens in the new AI future? 

The article listed above should raise a lot of other questions for humans, but also for Quakers because soon it will be impossible to operate with any kind of integrity in the brave new world. 

WHY? 

Because increasingly it will be harder and harder to know what is true (A.I. lies -- the so-called hallucination.  And that might be just an innocent mistake or it could be built into an algorithm)  Also, as digital currency comes into being it will be very hard to discover flows of money into political pockets but for the peonage it will be an oppressive form of control and impossible to opt out and still be able to operate in society. 

So what will the people of the future do?  And by future I mean 2030. 

The dark answer is Transhumanism.  People will feel increasing pressure to MERGE WITH MACHINES.  I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this materialization of humanity will be the death of spirituality ... unless we act now.  

So let this blog serve as a warning.  A klaxon signaling danger.  

Will A.I. Regulate Itself? 

In a recent article in The Atlantic (https://archive.is/xWUOH) the authors reckoned that two things will alter the course of A.I. in just the next few years.  One is RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) and the other is Quantum Computing.   RSI is when an A.I. system improves itself without human intervention.  In this scenario we could see things like humans being locked out of decision making loops and the A.I. going off on its own leaving humans without any understanding of what is in the code or how to stop it.  

In the current scenario of zero's and ones computing we could still grapple with A.I. even though it is still operating at the speed of electrons.  But imagine a scenario where instead of linear line by line code is created and evaluated for functionality thousands or millions of lines of code is being created at once to arrive at a solution.  That is Quantum Computing.  Think of a mouse in a maze trying to get to the cheese.  One mouse going down one tunnel at a time.  In Quantum computing you have an unlimited number of mice and the cheese is found much faster -- in nanoseconds.  For comparison a human brain cell operates on the order of milliseconds.  Let's put that in perspective.  A millisecond is one thousandth of a second (1/1000 or 0.001 seconds), while a nanosecond is one billionth of a second (1/1,000,000,000 or 0.000000001 seconds). Essentially, a millisecond is 1,000,000 (one million) times larger than a nanosecond.  

In Trump's "big beautiful bill" (not) it specifically says that AI shall not be regulated?  If you thought packing the supreme court was dangerous wait till we see how an unregulated A.I. operates.  Here is just one grim imagining. 

A.I. is trained to come up with a solution for better crop yields and RSI is employed.  A.I. eventually determines that crops prefer a warmer world and that the best way to do that is to make sure more CO2 is in the atmosphere and that we need more land for crops. So it logically creates more traffic jams that burn more fuel, it designs everything to be a little less efficient to bump up CO2.  It also notices that the best farmland is in an area densely populated by trees in the south and that fire is a great way to restore the land so it overloads the grid on those areas, explodes transformers and starts massive forest fires. 

Is this absurd? 

Consider that we have no idea if the A.I. companies that are unregulated  have a kill switch to control any of this.  How would they even know it is about to happen if decisions are being made in a billionth of a second?  

The A.I. future we are living into is going to be a hellscape.  Much like the nuclear world we now occupy.  At any moment these genies of death can run amok.  Nuclear is mostly zero's and ones digital. The president still has the final launch authority (and that is no comfort at all).  In civil nuclear power we can barely manage to have the foresight to keep generators off the ground in a tsunami or have pumps and valves (analog systems) that work reliably.  What will happen when we are completely blind to the entire process? 


~ Joseph Olejak