Around the first Earth Day in 1970, Americans were being warned of catastrophic famine, overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and even global cooling.
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Then, starting in the 1980’s and for the last 40 years, we have repeatedly been warned that we would die because of our use of natural resources that supposedly are causing climate change that will destroy the planet. We have been told multiple times that we only have ten years left to solve the problem.
Then in 2020, we were told that a huge percentage of the population would die if we weren’t locked down, if we didn’t wear masks, if we didn’t take vaccines, if we didn’t put up plexiglass, and if we didn’t stay six feet apart because of a virus that originated in China.
Now we are told that we only have ten years left before AI kills all of us off.
So how specifically is this going to happen? According to Axios:
Experts generally worry about two broad paths to catastrophe: humans weaponizing extremely powerful AI, or humans losing control of it.
- In these scenarios, AI could make it easier for bad actors to create biological, chemical or other weapons.
- Or rogue systems could attack infrastructure at unprecedented scale while evading human oversight.
Look at the first way we are told AI could kill us off: AI could make it easier to create biological weapons.
Isn’t that what China and other countries have done with their biolabs?
Isn’t that what Dr. Fauci did when he had the United States fund gain-of-function research in China and then hid the information from the public?
As for nuclear and other weapons, the Obama and Biden administrations, along with Europe, provided Iran with sanctions relief and greater access to previously restricted assets, giving the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism additional resources at the same time it was developing its nuclear program, building conventional weapons, and supporting terrorist proxies.
And after drawing a “red line” over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, Obama declined to enforce that red line militarily after Assad’s chemical attack.
There are a lot of dangerous humans roaming the Earth, and we should worry about them programming or using AI. We should obviously put many controls on it.
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But two separate dangers are being discussed here.
The first is human misuse. People could use increasingly powerful AI to design pathogens, conduct cyberattacks, develop weapons, or cause other forms of destruction. That is frightening, but it is fundamentally an old problem: dangerous human beings using increasingly powerful tools.
The second possibility is much more novel. Researchers warn that a sufficiently advanced AI system could become autonomous enough to evade human oversight, resist attempts to shut it down, or improve its own capabilities until humans could no longer control it.
But that raises some questions that deserve serious answers. What physical resources could an AI actually command? Who connects it to the electrical grid, laboratories, weapons systems, money, factories, robots, or communications infrastructure? Why would humans grant it those permissions in the first place? And what safeguards could prevent an AI system from obtaining or exploiting them?
Those seem like essential questions if we are being told that AI could actually wipe out humanity within ten years.
It is a shame that so many people who are trying to scare the public about this are the same ones who sought to continuously scare the public with decades of failed climate-catastrophe predictions and with all the lies Dr. Fauci told.
Fear should not substitute for analysis. AI may pose very serious dangers, especially when dangerous humans use it for destructive purposes. And if there really is a plausible path by which an autonomous AI could escape human control and destroy humanity, we should understand that path and take reasonable precautions against it.
But before accepting yet another prediction that humanity has only ten years left, perhaps we should insist on knowing exactly how the predicted catastrophe is supposed to happen.
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Image created using AI.