AI Is Driving Many Crazy: Our Latest Panic
Please do not join in
Here is a typical calm well-reasoned take on computer models (a.k.a. AI):
I pointed out: “Stop terrorizing yourself. AI is just computer models, hooked to the wall by cords that can be unplugged.”
Just like with “climate change” and during the covid panic, this good and true news was not taken well. At all. One fellow’s response was typical: “It’s okay my man keep reading your cope fiction. You just don’t understand that in the near future AI will be a god-like entity”.
You will have seen many similar pronouncements of Doom. AI is going to take all white collar jobs. AI is going to slaughter Hollywood. AI is going to gut the legal profession. AI will code everything, and all engineers will be out on the street.
AI is going to get us all. We need to get it before it gets us. But don’t think AI doesn’t “know” this and will take steps to stop us.
Common is this report: “Daisy McGregor, UK policy chief at Anthropic, a top AI company, says it’s ‘massively concerning’ that Anthropic’s Claude AI has shown in testing that it’s willing to blackmail and kill in order to avoid being shut down.”
She was asked, “It was ready to kill someone, wasn’t it?” She answered, “Yes.”
How? How could a computer model kill somebody? By flashing the screen hoping somebody looking at it would have a seizure? Spitting out nasty messages on a terminal nobody has to view? Sending emails to hitmen with your home address?
Blackmail is slightly more believable. It could threaten to broadcast a user’s sexual proclivities, or equally nefarious online behaviors. But all coders have to do is insert code to make it stop that.The code wouldn’t have the capability in the first place had the coders not allowed the possibility.
Either way, all we have to do is unplug it.
“No, Briggs! Unplugging will be impossible! Impossible! AI is hooked into everything. It is inserting hidden copies of itself everywhere! If we unplug it we will all die! Everything will crash!”
Perhaps we don’t have to unplug it, but merely slow down research?
“This won’t work. And if we go slow or unplug, China will win the AI race!”
Race to where? To their doom?
Many, many people offered these very arguments to me. It’s like Y2K was infected by covid.
Unplugging would cause temporary delays in some things. We know what these are like. We have internet and other associated outages all the time. Even things like air traffic control has gone down, not to mention airlines themselves. The SWIFT global money transfer system went down in 2024 for some time. Et cetera, et cetera.
Yet we abide.
What everybody seems to forget is that we have have computer models hooked to everything for years. A mixed blessing, to be sure, but we do abide. AI is the same thing but with a different label.
AI-doom mongering is yet another in a long and endless line of panics. We only just got out of one. And now we need another. People must have really enjoyed the last one, and were nostalgic for it.
This fresh panic has so far mainly seized so-called elites. “Something Big is Happening” wrote one of them, or rather had AI write for him, to millions of views. It wasn’t clear if he was all in on panicking or selling the AI systems in which he has an interest.
Like all these things, there is vast imprecision in the panic. You get the idea of dread, but you’re never quite sure what form it’s supposed to take. Nail down a specific reason for panic and it’s instantly abandoned for other reasons. Mutually contradictory things are believed with equal ardency. What matters, as in all panics, is that you are seen to care.
I tried showing many the article proving AI is just a computer model, and has not and will not, reach AGI. Which you’d think would be welcomed with great cheers of joy. What good news! There is no reason to worry!
Can you guess whether this news was received gratefully and happily or hatefully and with great scorn? Exchanges like this were common:
“AI will be a god-like entity!”
God-like? What kind of god, like?
“It will take all jobs away and everybody will starve!”
Everybody will just sort of mill around all day, waiting to die, as AI rules the world?
“It will change everything!”
I hope it can change my oil. But I won’t be afford to buy it, since I won’t have a job. There won’t even be any oil, since nobody will be able to buy it. Or have any need for it.
No one bothers thinking this through.
One guy. “I’m cutting you some slack because you’re uneducated… The only way to stop a virus…. An Ai is to turn off every source or energy all at once. This thing lives, moves, and may well be conscious. The only thing that can save us is a CME…. Aka a coronal mass ejection or solar flare causing an EMP…. Guess what, we’re well overdue for one too.”
Another: “I hope you’re one of the first people to die from AI.”
On and on and on; vitriol is never in short supply.
Now about AI stealing all jobs, how is it that everybody forgets Parkinson’s law? Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. This has been a solid an economic fact as anything, but somehow AI will end it? Of course not. From the link: “A 8-month field study at a US tech company with about 200 employees found that AI use did not shrink work, it intensified it, and made employees busier”.
No kidding. A simple outcome predictable to anyone not upset by demons of their own creation.
People love and cherish their fear. We saw it in the covid panic, too. Do not try to bring any panicker good news. They do not take it well.
I’m sure we’ll have more to say about this later.
Video
More
“AI Will Kill Us All!” Say People Programming AI To Kill Us All
The Limitations Of AI: General Or Real Intelligence Is Not Possible
Here are the various ways to support this work:
This is spot on: "It’s like Y2K was infected by covid." - because that oh-so-long ago Y2K was a tech-fear-porn event, not to her confused with the concurrent 'climate breakdown' (this is the lates description for it) fear porn and the following global one about covid.
It seems people cannot function properly without some huge but vague threat hanging over them. This used to be short-term, like fear of a plague or fear of the atomic bomb but ever since covid it's become a life-art in which everybody (except you and me, of course) indulges. It's the activity now known as 'doom scrolling' and we ought to be grateful to all those AI doom mongers to have provided the doom scrollers with yet another extra fillip, because a nuclear war isn't scary any longer and even most of the population is seeing the 'climate breakdown' for the scam it is and has been.
(Btw - I'd also like to know how AI is going to kill me ... )
"You just don’t understand that in the near future AI will be a god-like entity"
From a person who unquestionably does not believe in God. Well, maybe AI is an improvement for those who have worshipped the power of government as a god.