Written by Montgomery Granger @mjgranger1
Our Pledge of Allegiance states, “One Nation, Under God, with Liberty and Justice for All.” It may soon also include A.I.
Artificial Intelligence, like the Jesus Revolution, pet rocks, and Barbie before it, has run smack into Big Everything: Government, Tech, Business, wokeness, Art, Education, etc.
Still hot off the griddle, it seems A.I. has captured the imagination (and greed) of nearly every sector of society. With weekly, daily, and even up-to-the-minute changes, improvements, and dangers, A.I. is the new Proctor and Gamble essential commodity, that is, if you want to stay alive and in the game of capitalism.
There is so much at stake that the government couldn’t keep its paws off the thing and let it regulate itself. There is too much at stake, meaning too much money to be had taxing citizens to pay for yet another global regulation initiative that will no doubt fail to truly regulate anything for the benefit of the people, instead simply costing us more of our limited, misspent, and abused funds.
We are constantly being bombarded by what amounts to a global pothole problem. Every city in the northern hemisphere that experiences cold, wet, icy winters has potholes. So, in this scenario, the global elites declare a global pothole crisis that will need to be studied (for billions of dollars) and then discussed (hundreds of millions of dollars), voted on (hundreds of millions of dollars), contributed to (billions of dollars), studied some more (hundreds of millions of dollars), discussed some more (hundreds of millions of dollars), disagreed on (hundreds of millions of dollars), contracted (billions of dollars), begun (hundreds of millions of dollars), stopped . . . you get the idea.
Hundreds of billions of dollars later, we would still have a global pothole problem, but now it’s reached critical mass and caused global gridlock. Rather than this crisis, we could all along have had local solutions to what are local problems.
Why can’t A.I. be the same way? Because “greed is good” for corporate wolves and governmental bureaucrats, technocrats, and politicians.
This is Hegelian dialectics, in which a solution to an invented problem already exists, and it’s not good for anybody but those who conjured it in the first place.
Doesn’t anyone see it coming?
You will be completely controlled by A.I.: Your job, your house, your car, your money, your food, your healthcare, your recreation, your church, your relationships. It will all be tied into a central metadata processor that will tell you what to think, where to go, what to wear, what to eat, who to see, who to pay, and how much.
And it will all be controlled not by elected representatives but by appointed bureaucrats, technocrats, and civil servants eager to please you with absolutely nothing of value.
For a glimpse at our near future, watch the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil (1985), about a “harried technocrat” (Jonathan Pryce) in a dystopian bureaucracy who is constantly befuddled by nonsensical regulations, rules, and characters all seemingly trying to prevent him from being happy.
A.I. has scrambled the brains of most of the people calling for regulations.
Is it just another techno toy, or is it 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 looking to protect itself by terminating us?
Just a few days ago, an international conference of political leaders and tech executives agreed to regulate A.I. (I don’t remember anyone asking the voters what we thought).
What’s New?
Twenty eight countries, including China and the United States, as well as the European Union, signed a declaration aimed at mitigating A.I. risks.
How the A.I. Declaration Works?
The declaration kicked off the United Kingdom’s first A.I. Safety Summit at Bletchley Park (a country house outside London, where Alan Turing and others cracked Germany’s Enigma code during World War II).
The signatories agreed to jointly study safety concerns, including disinformation, cybersecurity, and biohazards. They committed to addressing risks within their borders but didn’t announce specific programs.
Ten countries, including France, Germany, Japan, the U.S., and the U.K., will nominate experts to lead an international A.I. panel akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This panel will prepare a report on the “state of A.I. science.” Mark Twain once said, “An expert is an ordinary [person] from another town.” These people scare me more than any A.I. program.
Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other companies agreed to allow governments to test A.I. products before releasing them to the public. Why?
That’s not the only question the Summit raises. A.I. safety institutes established by individual countries will administer the tests. On whose authority? The U.K. and U.S. announced such institutes, which pledged to collaborate with each other and their counterparts in other countries. With what checks and balances? Accountable to whom?
More to come:
The A.I. Safety Summit is set to be the first in a series. South Korea will host a follow-up in six months. France will host a third six months after that.
Yes, but:
Critics found the Summit wanting. Some researchers criticized it for failing to endorse concrete limits on A.I. Others blamed the speakers for promoting fear, particularly U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who compared the A.I. risks to a global pandemic or nuclear war.
And there you have your Hegelian dialectic.
A.I. can be boiled down to really smart programming, but even Geoffrey Hinton, a notable authority on the ethics of A.I., says A.I. is dangerous because it can and will become authoritarian and sentient in its own right, even perhaps as soon as five years from now. He says it could control everything by then. Yikes!
Is this the cyber-Kraken? The Borg unleashed? Evil, Inc.?
Whatever Can We Do About It?
It’s as if we’re on the back of a caboose on a runaway train called Progress, only able to see where we’ve been, and there are demons at the switches!
None of us can control this beast. But should we?
The government and global elites say, “Yes!” Well then, that’s that, isn’t it? The cabal is all-in on A.I. regulation: rules, mandates, policies, programs, and, dare I say it, laws!
But how much of a say in all this do we, the people, have? Why can’t there be regular people on these panels? How about some brilliant young people? Everyone I see in the photo of the elites at the A.I. Safety Summit appears to be 50 or above. How about some people who might actually have meaningful interactions with the essence of A.I., such as the operators and the prompt engineers who speak A.I. language? How many of them will be in the focus groups and policy parties?
I use A.I. every day, on purpose. I have had weeks-long conversation threads about morals, ethics, religion, and politics. I have been suspended numerous times and had image generation A.I. bots refuse to create images for me based on “dangerous content” of a religious, cultural, or political nature. What does that look like? Well, for one, I have put in Bible verses and been thwarted by the algorithms. And don’t even try to challenge woke issues like Black Lives Matter, ANTIFA, Ukraine, Russia, etc. In fact, many subjects are off limits or “too sensitive”—even Huckleberry Finn! Why? Because bots make stuff up just to complete the sentence. They lie. And the creators don’t want their machines caught in a cancel culture lie that could discredit the whole A.I. genre before it can even get up and walk on its own.
If you spend enough time with the chatbots, you discover that the same biases and prejudices that exist in cancel culture today are prevalent in A.I. It’s all programming, folks! It’s all a scam.
If A.I. is dangerous, it’s because a human being made it dangerous.
I remember when computers first came on line with businesses. The favorite phrase was: ”Oh, it’s a computer glitch.” Translation: “A human messed up,” because computers don’t program or operate themselves.
The weakest element of any system is the human element because humans are fallible. Because of this, no system is 100 percent reliable.
A.I. is no different. It is created, programmed, and maintained by fallible humans.
There are many useful purposes for A.I., and even now, A.I. is responsible for many hours of saved time doing mundane tasks better than humans.
But this is not a reason for global regulation.
Open code and self-regulation scare the powers that be because they can’t control that. And to get you to agree to their controls, they will try to scare the bejeebers out of you in any way they can.
Recently, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr came out against proposed regulations from President Biden, who has called on the FCC to adopt new Internet rules of breathtaking scope.
Those rules would give the federal government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions—from how ISPs allocate capital and where they build to the services that consumers can purchase, from the profits that ISPs can realize and how they market and advertise services, to the discounts and promotions that consumers can receive.
No doubt, this would include A.I. and its satellite industries.
It’s all about control, people, and we are being left in the dust on this stuff.
Contact your elected officials and let them know what you think of all this and what you expect them to do about it. Remind them that elections have consequences, and their job is to represent your interests, not those of a political caucus or private entity. This is an all-call urgent message, so do not delay!