Here is a report on a brief speech made by U.N. “rights chief” Volker Turk, warning that AI, i.e. computer models, are an “existential risk” to man.
“I share the concerns of industry insiders that advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity,” Turk told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva in a sweeping speech ahead of the start of his second term next month.
“I am calling here, today, for an all-out effort to put cast iron guarantees in place around the safety and security of AI, before it is too late.”
Without naming them, Turk warned that just a handful of men held “almost unlimited power over AI”. Top AI companies include Meta (META.O), opens new tab, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab.
“At a minimum, we need countries hosting AI and those involved in its supply chains to come together around agreed red lines,” he said.
Turk’s remarks echoed prior warnings from top artificial intelligence executives themselves about extinction risks from AI, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The United Nations has called for harmonised ?rules to reduce the risks and held its first global meeting on governance in July.
Never mind the silliness of computer models becoming an “existential risk”, which is clearly a ploy to frighten people into supporting whatever power grabs Turk has in mind. At the least, one imagines, he wants to appoint yet another self-perpetuating bureaucracy to “study” the “risk” of computer models, and so regulate the industry in perpetuity. He may even be trying to Al-Sharpton wealthy AI companies for shakedown money.
Here, as a late addition, are 10 reasons not to fear AI/computer models:
The Paper Test Shows Why AGI Is Not Possible: And Why The Brain Is Different In Kind
The Limitations Of AI: General Or Real Intelligence Is Not Possible
The Great Smoothing: Another Reason Not To Fear (or trust) AI
What strikes us as curious is that this plea came from a “rights” chief. Why “rights”?
He’s using “rights”, and in doing so must appoint himself Master of Mankind: man, he says, has a “right” not to be existentialed, as it were, by computer models. Never mind that computer models can’t do this. He has invented this “right”, and he hopes people will want it, and needs them to, so that he can promise to use the power given to him by people’s desire to protect them from the fear he instilled in them. Follow that?
Think about “rights” demands. The “rights” chief wants people to make the demand. He needs to build in them an urgency to cry “Save me!” And he’ll be ready to assume new powers in the name of that cry. He isn’t the only one, of course. Many politicians, all over the West, are actively angling to get on this lucrative power growth area.
Now we ought to have learned the lesson about “rights”, the hard way, in the covid panic. We did not. People ran around hersterically screaming “Save me!” They demanded the “right” not to be sick, and the “right” not to let possibly sick people near them. Many were willing to surrender anything to get these newly invented “rights”.
In every “right” like these, people want something, and they don’t have much or any interest in laboring for it. The “right” is theirs because they want it, which is the only argument they need to convince themselves they ought to have it. What they then need is somebody—not themselves!—empowered to give it to them. And there are always those who would carve out the power to claim to be able to do make these gifts. Whether these rights-givers can, in fact, provide the “rights” is a different question, often answered in the negative.
Consider “health insurance” provided by employers, which is widely considered a “right”. There are two problems with that sentence. The first is that the “health insurance” isn’t insurance, but is instead socialized money for medical (and many adjacent and sketchy) services. Let that pass. The second is the word provided. Coerced is far better.
Employers are forced to pay because they are employers. The law makes them fulfill the “right” to this “insurance.” The question is not whether some employer may want to reward a man who does a job for him, but that other entities promise to punish the employer if he does not give this “reward.”
The same applies to “family leave.” Employers are forced to pay, largely females, not to work. Because they are employers. People demanded that “right”, and politicians assumed powers to grant it.
People demanded the “right” not to be insulted or mistreated because of personal characteristics. Men rose up to seize power to enforce these new, indifferently and asymmetrically applied, rules. Now we have forced association and we are forbidden to “discriminate” (once a positive word meaning superior discernment, now a sin).
People demand the “right” to just about any product: food, of all kinds, water, cellphones, housing, internet, clothes, cars or any transportation, on and on. Even health! It would be a valuable exercise to find something that somebody or some group hasn’t declared was a “right”.
You must see that every demand creates or concentrates power into the hands of a few. If that were all that happened, that might be acceptable, in some weird sense. But that’s not all that happens. The result is not only to concentrate power in politicians (to use a neutral word), but also employers. The smaller employers fall by the wayside, unable to keep up. Consolidation happens, bigger companies grow bigger, and gain more control, including seeking rents with the politicians who demand employers provide “rights”, finally becoming branches of extensxions of political power. That’s certainly what many want with computer models (AI, remember).
Politicians never stop at dispensing the new “right”, and some never even start because the “right” is practically impossible to fulfill. But they also use the powers granted them to dictate ever more areas of life. Rules grow without bound.
The situation is pathetic and creates an even more servile state of mind in those that demand “rights”. “Rights” demanders no long have understandings with employers to provide labor, they instead demand to be treated more akin to servants. “Save me! O great Employer from my diseases! Do not let computer models existential me!”
This creates a permanent weakness in the minds of those clamoring for ever more rights, which only few escape (into power). This concentrates more power into the state, which now of course includes more and more activities of employers. As the rules grow, people become accustomed to the idea that all things come from government. Personal enterprise is deprecated. People increasingly demand to be cared for in more ways. “Rights” create Nietzschean last men.
I can think of no better proof of this, at least with respect to computer models, than we have Hilary Clinton herself calling for government to create a program for “AI safety.” Meaning government control. Meaning her, and her friends’, control, since government is only people—people who do not demand “rights” for themselves.
Video
All my work is free and user-supported. Here’s how to help:
“The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom (or rights) by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response.
To beg for the blessing of “authority” is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave.”
- Larken Rose
Volker Turk sounds like a World War II airplane.
"Volker Turks at twelve o'clock! Full throttle!"