Will AI Really Take Over? The Debate Over Personhood | Crossroads

there are a few key things that need to be discussed with AI that tie into the way that our world has been altered in ways that some people may not even realize have already been done. To the extent that even human interactions, even the markets, even businesses, and even entertainment are already being manipulated within a feedback loop that is outside of human control. And I wanna explain to you the real dystopia that is already existing, that has been created by these systems, and how AI and in its recent developments is going to amplify what has already been taking place. I'm gonna go into some things that people may not be aware of. Let me show you this first. Epoch Times had this story. It said, if we go ahead on this, everyone will die. Warren's AI expert calling for absolute shutdown, an absolute shutdown of AI. And it said, human beings are not ready for a powerful AI under present conditions or even for the foreseeable future. Stated a foremost expert in the field, adding that the recent open letter calling for a six month moratorium on developing advanced artificial intelligence is quote, understating the seriousness of the situation. He said, the key issue is not human competitive intelligence as the open letter puts it. It's what happens after AI gets to smarter than human intelligence. And this individual, Elysier, Elysier Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and leading AI researcher said in a March 29th Time Magazine op-ed. He continued stating, many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI under anything remotely like the current circumstances is that literally everyone on earth will die. Sounds pretty extreme, but let's explain. He said, quote, not as in maybe possibly some remote chance, but as in that is the obvious thing that would happen. It's not that you can't in principle survive creating something much smarter than you. It's that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers. Again, he wrote this in a Time Magazine piece. It says, after the recent popularity and explosive growth of chat GPT, several business leaders and researchers, now totaling 1,843, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple, signed a letter calling on, calling on, quote, all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than chat GPT-4. And it says, GPT-4 released in March and is the latest version of OpenAI's chat box, chat GPT. Further, and it states that Yudkowsky predicts that in the absence of meticulous preparation, the AI will have vastly different demands from humans and once self-aware will, quote, not care for us, nor any other sentient life. And he said, quote, that kind of caring is something that could, in principle, be imbued into an AI, but we are not ready and do not currently know how. This is the reason why he's calling for the absolute shutdown. Now, I should note briefly, I don't think they can shut it down. I don't think they can even pause it. The reality is people have already built businesses around it. You already have like BuzzFeed even implementing it into like their journalistic practices. You already have home versions of it where you can download and install locally versions of chat GPT-4. It's already, the cat's already out of the bag. The genie's already out of the bottle. You can't put it back in. Not only that, but in terms of international competition, other countries are working on this as well. China's working on it, the CCP. They have a saying, surpass you at the turning point, meaning there are different junctions when it comes to technological advancement and new technologies. There are programs, China 2025, now China 2030, programs like Project 863, for example, already detail their intent. They have programs for this. Detail their intent to what they call, again, surpass you at the turning point, meaning beat the United States within key high-tech areas, one of the main ones being AI. And the CCP, given the fact that it collects way more data and that the data in China is centralized under the CCP as opposed to independent businesses, under the national security law, for example, and their cybersecurity law, for example. The Chinese Communist Party, from every single business operating inside China, is able to collect that data. That biometric data is also being collected and used for similar programs by the Chinese Communist Party. If the US were to shut it down at this point, China would become the world leader on AI. You can't put the cat back in the bag. It's out. And so there needs to be another solution to it, given that reality, in my opinion. But it notes, without a human approach to life, the AI will simply consider all sentient beings to be, quote, made up of atoms it can use for something else. And there is little humanity, little humanity that can do to stop it. Udowskis compared the scenario to a 10-year-old trying to play chess against Stockfish 15. No human chess player has yet been able to beat Stockfish. Talking about this, you know, AI, or artificial intelligent chess player, which is considered an impossible feat. You can't beat it. The industry veteran asked readers to imagine AI technology as not being contained within the confines of the internet. Visualize an entire alien civilization thinking at millions of times human speed. Initially confined to computers in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. The AI will expand its influence outside the periphery of physical networks and could, quote, build artificial life forms using laboratories where proteins are produced using DNA strings. Things they already have to an extent. The end result of building an all-powerful AI under present conditions would be the death of every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth, he warned. Now, I would argue that we need to rethink, this is my take, and I will go into a few other things as well. We need to rethink what we call a robot. When you understand the nature of a robot, understand that it is merely an electronic system or an electronic infrastructure that is controlled by an artificial intelligence. And understand how much of our society has now been diverted to be run by such systems. The robot, in other words, could become the city itself. The robot, for example, could become the cars in the city and the computers in the city and the devices in the city, all of which are part of the body of this artificial intelligence. A decentralized robot, in other words, working through the networks that permeate all of these devices. That is what we have created already. Once you give that thing an intelligence and some degree of autonomy, who knows what it's gonna do? Think of like, was it HAL 15 or what was it? Yeah, so we mentioned the 15 minute cities and so on. Now, we can also rethink a self-replicating robot. Because one of the doomsday scenarios, as this person mentioned, is once a robot, once a robot can self-replicate, once the AI can, for example, even access laboratories where it can create DNA strands and begin manufacturing its own species, begin getting into biotechnology and such, which is not an unforeseeable thing. I could even, for example, imagine that researchers at some of these facilities might even see it as useful to allow an AI to gain control over this. Because you already see it, for example, with people doing code who are, for example, using chat GPT for putting in code for websites or programs or even video games. And having the chat, having the chat GPT for, actually, it was at HAL 9000, thank you. Having the AI system actually find errors within the code and perfect their code. Understand that when you get into biotechnology and these things, it works in the same principles as coding, just to a much more granular level. And the amount of data processing that could be done with this could simplify that process to a huge extent. It's not unforeseeable whatsoever that in the very short term, you could have the scenario this individual is warning about, where the AI could create even biotechnology life forms. But aside from that very sci-fi perspective, we can look at what's already taking place. We can think of the body of an AI, the robot being the society itself, being the network of devices. AI, if it can create additional AIs, would achieve the same result. And you've actually already seen people who have programmed AI to, one person made a joke and told AI to destroy humanity, and they put it on an automated thing where it's operating autonomously now. One of the first things it did was started programming its own AI, meaning it has already entered a self-replicating loop and it's already programming other AI to carry out tasks on its behalf. In other words, the AI is already self-replicating within the body of technology in which it currently exists. Now, this brings about, I think, a bigger debate on one of the main problems society is already facing and that I think we've been facing for a long time. And I think most people are completely unaware of. In my opinion, probably one of the biggest problems facing humanity right now, and this is not new. This has been happening for a long time and AI is gonna make it significantly worse. Essentially, what we're living in right now is to a degree, a feedback loop of data. And let me explain this. Understand one of the main ways that investment and market data changed with the advent of computers, actually with the advent of the internet. From the very early stages of the advent of the internet, one of the first things that was done was creating devices for market analysis and data and so on. People used it for advanced investment and things like this, right? Different people on Wall Street make a whole lot of money having technologies that monitor market data and speed up the task of investing or divesting or whatever else. Because if you think of the Wall Street traders on the ground, an AI, an electronic system that can calculate data and do things very quickly can be more effective than any human trader working on the floor of Wall Street. That is already in place and has been in place for a very long time. And so we can understand that markets and investment, to an extent, are already run by AI and they've been for decades. Understand now that the markets are informed by data collected by the AI. And so the AI is basing its investments off data. What happens then when the data is also created by AI? This is when you get into the realms of consumer feedback, the feedback loop within what people want and what people buy. This is entertainment, it's music, it's movies, all these things that we consume, that we desire. One of the reasons why Hollywood has become so utterly boring is because it's all based on formulas. One of the reasons why music seems so plastic these days is because a lot of it is AI generated. A lot of it is not even being done by people anymore. It's melodies and so on being developed by robots, by AI. And people, of course, clean it up, essentially. So in other words, the data that informs the AI, that controls the market, is also now, to an extent, being run by AI. And what ChatGPT does in these new AI coming out, OpenAI, is that it has increased the rate at which the information or the degree to which information is being generated by AI. Keep in mind that as things currently work, AI is pulling from human-generated information to a large extent. Human-generated news articles, human-generated studies, human-generated books and scientific papers, and so on. Because of the lack of ability to compete within that market you're now having journalists, you're now having scientific researchers, you're now having bloggers and social media people turning to AI to automate processes and do their work for them. There are many people doing it already, even if the company is not asking them to do it because they're lazy and it makes their job easier. We're entering a state, in other words, where the data that AI is pulling from for its own analysis is also increasingly being generated by AI itself. To the extent that AI, in the short term it's been out, from what I've read, has already produced more information, more books, more pages, more so on, than the entire breadth of publishing in all of human history. We're living, in other words, already within an AI-generated feedback loop. And this is one of the big things I'm concerned about, because the metric of what it provides on the consumer level, on the market level, the things it tells businesses they should make, the things it tells people based on, let's say, analytics based on your social media presence and the ads you're fed, right? A lot of that's AI-driven, a lot of it's machine learning. And so the advertisements you might be shown, a lot of that is being done in an automated fashion. All of this is based on data. And based on this data, it's providing you with what you desire. Now, understand what that means. The main metric of what is being provided by AI is human consumption. And that's what drives the market, of course, right? Which then informs what it provides to us, and then the market is determined, essentially, if we break it down, the market is being determined by human desire. As morality deteriorates, as it feeds you these things more and more, what humans desire is also going to degenerate, meaning that what we want is gonna be on a lower and lower moral threshold. And what AI is going to provide us is going to match what is the base of human desire.