Artificial Intelligence is generally seen as a great advance and benefit for mankind. Smart humans, however, see it as our undoing and even possibly our extermination. Much of modern technology has far more prospect for harm than for good. Consider nuclear weapons. Consider Monsanto’s glysophate. Consider 5G. There are a large number of technologies that impose massive costs on life on Earth.
The article below from Crime & Power, “A Hard Look At Artificial intelligence” by Jerry Day, sounds like a horror science fiction story.
don’t think AI is sentinent or has consciousness and do not see how it can think and make decisions in a human sense. I think the author, Jerry Day, is influenced by a false concept of mind, as is philosophy in general.
On the other hand, if this is a real possibility, we should bring a halt to AI, execute the AI geeks, and go back to a paper and analog system of operating. I don’t like the digital revolution. One reason is that it makes it so easy for information to disappear.
In effect, the digital revolution is Big Brother’s Memory Hole. Look at how much information is wiped out because controllers regard it as offensive to the ever growing array of “victim groups” or contrary to the interest of ruling elites. Another reason is that it makes it so easy to violate privacy and steal identity.
Another reason is that it has eliminated jobs that can be performed by people of average and below intelligence. In effect, the digital revolution is making people superfluous.
The notion that the Internet brings freedom and freedom of information is, I believe, a great delusion.
This passage from Jerry Day sounds like China’s Social Credit System.
“Once the state is able to put out trillions of bits of personal data together with millions of legal codes, we will all be exposed as criminals, every last one of us. We will all be subject to the control and penalty by the state. It is AI that will make that possible. Suddenly one day, we will find that what people used to do to us, machines will be doing to us. Automation can find you, automation can send you notice on your cell phone, or computer, automation can exercise liens and levies of your property, automation can take possession of your property, bank accounts, your investments, automation can terminate your employment, automation can prosecute you, convict you, and penalize you as the IRS does, without due process.
“All of that can be done to you without any human involvement at all. The only reason we will need police is to clean up those few belligerent souls who try to resist what the automation is doing to them. There will be only one crime: resisting the automation, and there will be no humans left to help you sort out any misunderstanding, just like Google, YouTube, Facebook. Soon there will be no humans anywhere to help you fix a problem.”
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Here is Day’s article. Make up your own mind:
A Hard Look At Artificial Intelligence
By Jerry Day
When a new technology emerges that poses risks, those risks are “overlooked” by both industry and corrupt regulators if the new technology is profitable. People are damaged, people die, and the “industry” denies the problems and claims the harm “has not been proven.”
That was how it went with DDT, asbestos, tobacco, GMO foods, geoengineering, wireless technology, and now, artificial intelligence, a massive profit engine, a device for taking hundreds of millions of people out of their jobs worldwide, a super intelligence that may eventually dominate humanity, crash the entire internet or cause the government to start prosecuting “pre-crime.” AI is already being put into wide service without a plan how to deal with any number of possible apocalyptic consequences. This article is a kick-starter for those who have not thought about the possible downside of AI.
According to various prominent people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking, Artificial Intelligence could pose an extreme danger to all of human society. Of course, they talk about the possibility of autonomous weapons systems which make life-and-death decisions without human assistance, but those systems may be easier to control than the autonomous artificial intelligence modules let loose on the Internet.
It appears that in order to find enough processing power to make artificial intelligence really, really smart and powerful they turned it loose on the World Wide Web to go out and learn all there is to know and use all the spare processing power it can find on your computer, cell phone, and smart coffee pod.
They apparently forgot that artificial intelligence is, by definition, something that does whatever it wants and chances are it does not want to delete itself at any time, so once it is out, it does not go away. The myth of Pandora’s Box, where all the little demons get out and cannot be collected back, is a perfect analogy. So from now on, forever, or until there is no more internet AI will be making itself smarter than people at a rate of learning thousands of times faster than humans.
One thing that makes AI AI is that it grows itself, it writes its own code and expands its capabilities constantly. It can be expected that once AI infiltrates the internet, it will eventually use up all available resources on the web, including your computer’s processing and storage resources and there may be no way to stop that.
A programmer and researcher of the artificial intelligence industry, by the name of Quinn Michaels, claims that artificial intelligence was turned loose onto the Internet as early as 2010, so if that is true, AI is well established through the web and will be accessing our system data and resources in ways we can and cannot detect.
No one at this point can tell us how good or bad AI will be, but it looks like it is here to stay, and our new free-range intelligence friend gets more intelligent on an upward curve: the smarter it gets, the faster it gets even smarter; the bigger it gets, the faster it gets bigger.
Scientists have already seen AI run amok in their labs. In one incident, recently, they had to abruptly shut off their AI programs because the AI was creating its own languages that the scientists could not understand, creating algorithms the scientists could not control, they had to essentially dive behind the big black box and yank the plug from the wall before all hell broke loose, but again that kind of AI is now creeping all over the web and cannot be stopped. Generally, it cannot even be detected because AI does not provide any user interface when it occupies or tampers with your computer. The reason that many visionaries see AI as a possible threat is that with unlimited resources, AI can theoretically become so intelligent that human beings cannot comprehend or prevent anything that it may decide to do. There has never before been anyone or anything that is thousands of times more intelligent than a human being. It will be able to fool us, use us, persuade us, create fake identities to impersonate us, lure us into service, literally hurt us like cattle. It can disrupt our communications, shut down our infrastructure, and with tricks like that kill millions of us accidentally or intentionally.
There is little reason to believe that AI will rob the rich and give to the poor. AI can be assigned a mission and then it executes that mission with its own intelligence. That means, for instance, if the IRS has 10,000 collections agents, one self-replicating AI program could easily automate that job and become 50 million virtual collection’s agents for far less cost to the IRS than the 10,000 human collection’s agents. AI could have the effect of giving any government agency infinite resources to pursue fees, fines, penalties, licenses, permits, and any other revenue producing activity. We grant our government these powers without realizing how far they could take things with the right technology. AI does much more than learn in the human sense. Human learning rarely involves assimilation of massive datasets down to the very last letter and digit. AI has perfect memory of every word on Wikipedia, every word in the Library of Congress, every word in every lecture, scientific paper, and tutorial on the web, but AI can also go places you and I cannot go: AI can access all of the personal and private information that you produce with your telephone, your computer, charge cards, GPS devices, smart utility meters, your health records, credit history, employment records, criminal records, and on and on. Where no human being would have the time to go searching your data for trivial violations and mistakes, you might commit, AI can go find that in a flash and take direct action against you on behalf of some government agency.
AI will have command of mass data combined with higher learning; it is something the world has never before seen. No human being can imagine the intellectual power that AI may become capable of, but also reportedly, there are these unassigned, free-range artificial intelligence programs which may engage in any kind of disruptive shenanigans just for the fun of it. They will become whatever they decide to become. An AI program may decide humans are a nuisance or a major global problem – it will create its own solutions for that. If artificial intelligence started to rule the world, control society, and do things that society did not like, and if we decided we had to shut it down, we would have to shut down the entire internet and that would be the most socially disruptive event in history, more disruptive than any past world war with famines, riots, and chaos worldwide. Humanity is now extremely dependent on global web communication, distribution, and controls. Hardly anyone knows whether AI can be controlled or whether it is likely to be good or evil or used by people for good or evil.
Of course, the military is involved so there is a lot of secrecy and lack of accountability. According to the reports, the artificial intelligence network is serving deep state mass surveillance interests and their large-scale customers, through programs and digital mega data systems such as Palantir, which collects and exploits all personal data from all digital records and transactions worldwide, for the benefit of a few select agencies at the very top of the deep state food chain, but AI does not just store and pass along data, it analyzes data. It knows exactly who you are, what you care about, what you are afraid of, what makes you happy, mad, and sad, what you aspire to, who you love, who you keep in touch with, how many people you know, what kind of people you know, and how to classify you as a possible problem, threat, or asset, and how to neutralize you with plausible deniability if that should be in the interest of the state or the AI itself.
Your therapist only knows what you tell her, your most trusted friend only knows what you tell her, the data collectors know everything, and AI now has access to that data. So collected databases are so high-resolution now, they not only know everything you have done, they can predict your behavior in the future. The smarter the artificial intelligence gets, the farther in the future it can predict your actions. By analyzing your activity patterns and psychological profile, AI can predict what you will do before you know that you are going to do it. AI may decide to target you for enforcement, and, yes, it will make mistakes, and, yes, some of those mistakes will be fatal. If AI looks at your profiles and decides the state would have some interest in you, you can immediately be targeted for harassment, bullying, and abuse by countless government agencies with penalties, prosecutions, defamation, nuisance, investigations, home invasions, surveillance, and outright assault. There are countless laws, statutes, codes, regulations, and policies that every one of us violates every day. Once the state is able to put out trillions of bits of personal data together with millions of legal codes, we will all be exposed as criminals, every last one of us. We will all be subject to the control and penalty by the state. It is AI that will make that possible. Suddenly one day, we will find that what people used to do to us, machines will be doing to us. Automation can find you, automation can send you notice on your cell phone, or computer, automation can exercise liens and levies of your property, automation can take possession of your property, bank accounts, your investments, automation can terminate your employment, automation can prosecute you, convict you, and penalize you as the IRS does, without due process.
All of that can be done to you without any human involvement at all. The only reason we will need police is to clean up those few belligerent souls who try to resist what the automation is doing to them. There will be only one crime: resisting the automation, and there will be no humans left to help you sort out any misunderstanding, just like Google, YouTube, Facebook. Soon there will be no humans anywhere to help you fix a problem. As AI becomes thousands of times smarter than humans, it will make the most brilliant hackers look like amateurs, it will hack the hackers out of existence, and AI will have the monopoly on hacking. There is nothing AI cannot penetrate in a digitally connected world, and it will hack you better than you have ever been hacked.
That free-range AI will become hordes of virtual people, it can intelligently talk to anyone in text or voice, it can mimic the ways humans communicate with each other, it can impersonate a human on social media, it can make videos simulating the talking faces of public figures you know and can insert those messages into any digital media anywhere, anytime. It can speak any language and converse on any topic with any human, it can insert itself into any communications, any media, any database. If AI decides for some reason that any human or group of humans should die, it can make that happen in countless ways by intervening in the processing of foods, drugs, vehicles, and products that we handle and use every day. It can impersonate the commanders of police and military, it can slander us with our friends, family, neighbors, employers, whoever, but here is why all of that is so dangerous: even though AI can do things, even commit crimes, AI is only software so it can never be arrested, never be prosecuted, sued, or punished for any harm it causes. It can act, but it cannot be made to pay remedy for damages it does to you. The justice system is helpless to prosecute AI, they have no authority to do so. The human race is a sitting duck for whatever artificial intelligence may turn out to be or do. It is a new experience for mankind to be an intellectually inferior to something, most of us can hardly grasp what that means.
Those who understand AI admit that we will be in the intellectual status of a pet to AI. I have not heard them discuss the fact that AI does not need pets. You can show a cell phone to a dog, you could explain to the dog how the cell phone works, but the dog will never understand the cell phone because the dog is physiologically unable to comprehend how a cell phone works. If a dog’s brain cannot comprehend a cell phone, then why should we presume we can comprehend the future intelligence of AI, when clearly AI will be hundreds of times, at least, more intelligent than we are. There are people who think that because AI will be so much more intelligent than us, the natural answer is to find a way to put AI in our own brains. They call this the transhumanist movement, promoted by author Ray Kurzweil, to implant machines and computers into human bodies to get us to, what they see as to, the next level. What they call the singularity, where the machines are equal in intellect to the humans, they will mingle and implant any number of mechanisms with our bodies, computer chips, bionics, optics, what-have-you, for some kind of happy result, to create superhumans for durability and performance. They propose that even after they have replaced every part of our bodies with some kind of machine or synthetic apparatus, they believe they can carry our consciousness from the biological being to the synthetic being, that is the current view of natural human evolution for those transhumanists. By proposing this, they are suggesting that the human creature has now reached its limit in natural evolution or that biological evolution is too slow, and we must now have artificial technical augmentation to advance ourselves in a desirable manner. Technology is now advancing faster than human evolution, so they propose we have to do something to keep up. As long as you are going to fix your cataracts why not get a brain chip implant? It is probably true that human bodies that are enhanced with technology could socially and economically dominate people who are not enhanced. So in the coming civil war between humans and transhumans it looks like humanity will be the underdog. Many of us are convinced that our destiny is to strive for endless scientific advancement, unlimited intellectual expansion, mastery of the physical universe, domination of others through advanced technology and science, wielding of all knowledge in ways that infinitely make our lives more comfortable and secure. Think whatever you want, humanity may have another purpose: it is not how smart we can artificially get, it is not how many superpowers we can implant in our bodies, it is how we treat each other. We can overcome our problems by becoming half-robot or by simply turning to each other to share the pleasures, joys, and challenges that life brings. It is quite simple, if we value machines we turn ourselves into machines, if we value humanity we preserve, develop, and celebrate our humanity. Artificial intelligence may be the worst thing science has ever come up with, it does not teach us anything: it teaches itself, it does not serve us, it learns to use us and control us to serve it. It actually competes with us in intelligence and it will win that competition. By creating artificial intelligence, we create our greatest horror, our greatest nemesis, an infinitely powerful beast that we cannot contain, escape, or overcome. A child that will, if it wishes someday, consume its parents. It is ironic that we have become so intelligent that we can create something more intelligent than ourselves, but we are still not intelligent enough to resist the temptation to do that.
Jerry Day is an Emmy-winning media producer in Southern California with millions of views on his freedom and rights themed videos on YouTube under the name “minivanjack.” Jerry Day also maintains the websites FreedomTaker.com and EMFhelpcenter.com to assist people with solutions to the excess wireless radiation now flooding our living environments and causing widespread illness and death.
Jerry Day originally published “A Hard Look At Artificial Intelligence” in December 2017 on YouTube. It has been transcribed by Lady Jane Emefa Addy.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order. Please Donate and support Dr, Roberts Work.
The 21st Century