Things To Come: AI

Will AI Take Over the World?

Jim Rickards

But from a broader AI perspective, the news is full of stories about how machines with vast computing power and blinding processing speeds, given access to billions of books and documents and the ability to teach themselves, are poised to take over the world.

Is it true? I’ve been studying AI and its potential for years, so I have a deeper understanding of AI than the average talking head.

I’ve actually spent time visiting with the world’s third-fastest non-government supercomputer (the HiPerGator AI computer at the University of Florida) as part of a project to apply generalized superintelligence and AI to national security tasks.

So how advanced is AI getting? How close is it to approaching a rough parity with human intelligence? And what dangers does it pose to humanity?

...So for now, you can just pull the plug. In fact, there are a number of safeguards being proposed to limit the potential damage of AI while still harnessing its enormous benefits.

This isn’t a technical article, but these safeguards include transparency (so that third parties can identify flaws), oversight, a weakened form of adversarial training (so the machine can solve problems without plotting against us in its spare time), approval-based modification (the machine has to “ask permission” before activating autonomous machine learning), recursive reward modeling (the machine only moves in certain directions where it gets a “pat on the head” from humans) and other similar tools.

Of course, none of these safeguards works if the power behind AI is malignant and actually wants to destroy mankind. This would be like putting atomic weapons in the hands of a desperate Adolf Hitler. We know what would have happened next.

The solution in that case would be more political, forensic and defense oriented. Intelligence gathering would play a huge role. Of course, that evolves quickly into a machine-versus-machine intelligence war of collection and deception.

AI is already being programmed with woke ideology, for example. You probably recall Google’s ridiculous Gemini AI-backed image generator that depicted Black Vikings, female popes and other absurd images. You can imagine the dystopian future that a woke superintelligence could create.

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