Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Now that Trump is President, what will replace the dying climate crisis narrative?
The replacement scare has to be a comparatively new field, with vast knowledge gaps which can be filled with wild speculation disguised as expert opinion. It must plausibly threaten the lives and security of ordinary people – to attract research funding. The exaggerated risks must have the potential to engage public imagination. The new scare must be radically different from previous scares – otherwise people will see it as recycled CO2 hype (think the methane scare). And the new scare must have the support of popular culture – Hollywood must get on board, to help spread the fear.
There is a crisis narrative which ticks all these boxes – the rising threat of uncontrolled artificial intelligence.
Hollywood is already well on board with the AI crisis. The following is a list of Hollywood films since year 2000 related to artificial intelligence (original source Wikipedia);
| Year | Count | Movies |
|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 1 | A.I. Artificial Intelligence |
| 2002 | 1 | S1M0NE |
| 2003 | 3 | The Matrix Reloaded, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, The Matrix Revolutions |
| 2004 | 1 | I, Robot |
| 2005 | 1 | The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy |
| 2007 | 1 | Transformers |
| 2008 | 3 | Eagle Eye, Iron Man, WALL-E |
| 2009 | 3 | Terminator Salvation, Moon, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen |
| 2011 | 2 | Real Steel, Transformers: Dark of the Moon |
| 2012 | 3 | Prometheus, Robot & Frank, Total Recall |
| 2013 | 4 | Her, Iron Man 3, The Machine, Pacific Rim |
| 2014 | 7 | Automata, Big Hero 6, Interstellar, Robocop (2014 film), Transcendence, Transformers: Age of Extinction, X-Men: Days of Future Past |
| 2015 | 8 | Ex Machina, Chappie, Tomorrowland, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Terminator Genisys, aka Terminator 5, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Uncanny, Psycho-pass: The Movie |
| 2016 | 3 | Max Steel, Morgan, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story |
| 2017 | 2 (so far) | Ghost in the Shell (2017 film), Transformers: The Last Knight |
It is difficult to gauge overall interest in AI. From the graph at the top of this article, the number of people entering two key AI related search terms is substantially down from a peak in 2004 (the earliest date Google provides search term data), but may again be on the rise.
The last month or so there appears to be a lot of press interest in AI – I’ve seen a lot of news articles recently which discuss the potential for artificial intelligence to impact the lives of ordinary people.
For example (just from the last few days);
How artificial intelligence can be corrupted to repress free speech
Big firms embrace artificial intelligence
Australia’s big businesses are embracing artificial intelligence (AI), with two-thirds planning to replace jobs…
Scientists advising the US military say fears of an AI existential threat are ‘uninformed’
Mulling the Economic Effect of Artificial Intelligence Many executives and economists said they believe the technology will end up creating more new jobs than it displaces …
Artificial Intelligence to Drive China VC Investments in 2017
There has been a lot of speculation that artificial intelligence might prevent President Trump from restoring middle class prosperity.
Commentary: Shift to automation may prevent Trump from delivering on his jobs promise
As the election results rolled in last night, it became increasingly clear that America — and the world — would never be the same. The American people overlooked all of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s faults and elected him to office in the belief that he will fix the nation’s deep-seated problems of inequity and injustice. And they rebelled against the business interests and corruption that they believed Hillary Clinton represented.
Trump’s victory was enabled by technology — everything from his use of social media to Clinton’s email scandals to Russian hacking. But advancements in technology and how they reshape our economy may also keep him from delivering on some of the major promises that made him so popular during the campaign season.
…
Read more http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-trump-biz-tech-automation-robots-jobs-20161109-story.html
Is artificial intelligence a real threat to security and prosperity? The beauty of speculating about such an unknown field is that nobody really knows. AI driven weapons might remove human conscience from the battlefield. Runaway AIs superseding their software constraints could wreak havoc, causing environmental catastrophe, maybe even completely destroying the world. Artificial intelligence threatens to permanently eliminate jobs, by raising the skills bar impossibly high, driving workers and the middle class into state dependency and financial ruin. But similar things have been said about almost every major historical technological advance – and have always turned out to be hype.
Artificial intelligence has good potential to frighten politicians into funding lots of expensive but inconclusive studies. Since strong AI doesn’t exist yet, all opinions about the future of artificial intelligence are highly speculative – which is why I am calling artificial intelligence as the next eco-scare, the true heir to the failed CO2 scare.
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The beauty of an AI scare is that AI looks like Al Gore. He can transition to the new fear and make more millions.
The next scare: Drug resistant deseases – except it isn’t a scare – its already here.
I have refused to use antibiotics for 16 years now, have Sjogren’s syndrome and got enough immune system problems as is. Over use of antibiotics is a major problem, bet your bippy!
Absolutely correct, and that’s why the Greens/Leftists aren’t interested.
I’d be very wary of pronouncing the global warming scam dead yet. There will be at least some of the green blob trying to represent any cut in funding Trump makes as a disaster for the planet – and we know that if they can fiddle the figures to apparently prove it to the average voter then they will.
Trump won’t last forever and in only 4 or 8 years the US could conceivably be stuck with a Gore Mk2 if AGW hasn’t definitively had a stake hammered into its heart.
I suspect it will need public hearings which expose the deception and corruption, and possibly criminal charges. If that doesn’t happen then AGW – or a very close relative – could rise again.
I think Eric is over-estimating the importance of Trump. He is only President of the USA. The Global Warming scare was made an international panic by Thatcher, and the world will carry on fussing about it even if the Americans stop. Trump’s influence might be able to reduce the fuss a bit, but I don’t expect it to end for a long time.
Though, on rethinking that, perhaps Trump may have more influence than I expect. I get the impression that the Russians don’t believe the Global Warming story at all (and with their climate they would love to) and that the Chinese are mainly offering it lip service to sound respectable. Perhaps, if the sermons from the USA stop, a period of official silence from China, Russia, and the USA will make it easier for others to quietly forget about it. I’m sure India and Indonesia would love to. That adds up to a large chunk of the world.
But too many politicians, pundits, celebrities, and climate “scientists” have nailed their trousers to the Global Warming mast for the story to vanish overnight.
The IPCC wanted to be the Turing Police.
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WHATEVER idea anybody proposes or eventually comes up with, remember one
thing above all: There must be sufficient opportunity for graft (by the political
class) OR it is never going to happen …
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.
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Just like taxes, if politicians couldn’t steal their fair share they would devise a different system.
Genetic manipulations of a virus escapes from Big Government labs morphs naturally into a new version that causes humans to act evermore irrationally.
Oops, sorry that’s already happened and the infected are marching against Trump’s Presidency.
As long as computers are made up of logic circuits, the only threat they pose comes from how they are programmed. If you weaponize a computer or robot and program it to wreak havoc, it can be a threat. But today’s computers do not reproduce or evolve no matter how fast or “super” they are. There’s no threat of them becoming self-aware or defying their programming. They have no real intelligence. They can only simulate intelligence based entirely on their programming and data. That’s why it’s called “artificial” intelligence. So I’m not concerned with AI, only evil programmers.
That being said, I don’t know enough about quantum computing to say anything about its potential. After sophisticated quantum computers have been developed, then their capabilities and possible threats can be tested and evaluated. Until then, “the rising threat of uncontrolled artificial intelligence” is just for the movies. Currently, only “controlled” artificial intelligence worries me, especially if it’s being controlled by an evil mad man.
I suggest you research ‘Jade Helm’, Louis. An AI system that has already been drill tested (2015), which maps large areas and tracks/analyses everyone within it, in real-time, and directs ‘hits’ either by drone or human killers.
I worked at a Hughes Aircraft research lab that had an AI unit. This was the late 80’s. The AI lab leader stated that interest in AI “Is on roughly a 20 year cycle” as it is brought up, becomes popular, achieves little to nothing, and goes back away until the next cycle of interest.
Donald I agree and was also involved at about the same time (early 80’s). At the risk of sounding banal, I think this time is different. Back in the 80’s the “state of the art” was expert systems. I never bought expert systems as anything but a dead end, it was just a clever way to index a decision tree.
But at about the same time John Hopfield published his work on self organizing neural networks and I believed it was a game changer even back then, that there really was an opportunity to build a true intelligence. I wasn’t able to convince my superiors and I moved on to a different specialty, but I think history has proven me correct. The “deep learning” systems that have emerged in the past decade suggest, to me anyway, that we really are on the verge of creating true intelligence and I think it’s very close. I believe this technology has legs and we’ll see commercial AI in the next decade.
Hey, I have an idea, kids; let’s all assume the universities have accidentally become useful idiot factories . . and the mass media has spontaneously become a matching propaganda system . . and the CAGW mistakenly became a multi-trillion dollar boo boo . . and Europe is serendipitously experiencing a massive influx of military age “refugees” who are transforming it into . . not Europe . . and that the US having a functioning border just coincidentally became a silly idea . . etc. etc . . and that there’s no reason at all to think the West is under any sort of intentional assault or anything . . ’cause we’re so damn intelligent ; )
In case no one has noticed, the dot gov universe needs a lot of cleanup. NOAA.gov is high on the list of sites that treat AGW without any apparent attention to scientific integrity. It needs to be not so much cleansed of warmist propaganda as it needs to be infused with the promise of actual scientific research into what drives the climate to change. The agenda should be studying climate change, not studying why civilization needs to stop burning fossil fuels. If such study provides adequate data that show AGW is an issue, I have no problem with that. I just do not want to hear, ever , for any reason, “the science is settled”.
Next eco-scare story ? — Drone pollution. Add artificial intelligence to THAT, and we have a winner.
I think you are way too optimistic. There are too many people who have staked their scientific careers on global warming who are still alive. Got to wait for them to die out. Politics will not putting an end to this until the global warming scientists die out.
Yes, it might be more effective to engage in efforts to deprogram their disciples and wait out their attrition, after all other avenues have been explored.
I think that their stake in the “man controls the climate” charade will be worthless before they expire, anyway. They get their money from taxes. We’ll see how many want to spent their on gidas to promote the panic.
“spent their on” = spend their own… Beer typing.
Several global cooling scientists apparently shamelessly flip-flopped to global warming. It wouldn’t be a big leap for them to jump on something else.
Wasn’t it Feynman who said we had to wait for all the old physicists to die before quantum theory would be accepted?
I do know he said this:
“If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part.”
― Richard Feynman
The Gaia author, James Lovelock is entirely in sympathy with this post on AI-
See ” James Lovelock: ‘ Before the end of this century, robots will have taken over’.” The Guardian Interview by Decca Aitkenhead, Friday, 30 September 2016.
“Fracking is great, the green movement is a religion, his dire predictions about climate change were nonsense- and robots don’t mind the heat, so what does it matter? At 97, the creator of Gaia theory is as mischievous and subversive as ever.”
The money quote from the interview-
” I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy, this climate change’.
And more gems:
“Lovelock now believes that ‘ CO2 is going up, but nowhere near as fast as they thought it would. The computer models just weren’t reliable.”
” But all this ( climate change) is more or less academic. ‘ Because quite soon-before we’ve reached the end of this century even- I think that what people call robots will have taken over ‘. Robots will rule the world? ‘ Well, yes. They’ll be in charge…..’ ”
So Freeman Dyson and James Lovelock are now in accord against “the consensus”!
AI will crash the internet and there’ll be no more Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, etc folks, if we don’t get some big bucks now to work out how to prevent it. Viruses, malware, Windoze and ransomware, but yo’all aint seen nothing yet.
Population Bomb’s Paul Ehrlich Invited to the Vatican
https://spectator.org/population-bombs-paul-ehrlich-invited-to-the-vatican/
Biological Extinction
How to Save the Natural World on Which We Depend
PAS-PASS Workshop, Casina Pio IV, 27 February-1 March 2017
http://www.pas.va/content/accademia/en/events/2017/extinction.html
http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/dam/accademia/booklet/booklet_extinction.pdf
http://earthsky.org/earth/40-billion-a-day-for-solar-super-storms
Folks, it’s Dark Matter. Be very afraid! No one knows what it is – but it’s out there, and we’d never know what hit us when it does, because Dark Matter is invisible to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. It could even be the realm of the paranormal and thus rival the current religion of AGW and Gaia worship!
Not a problem. it was sorted years ago.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
Isaac Asimov found a loophole.
When robots are smart enough to realise human leaders are causing harm through their inadequate decision making, robots are compelled by the first law to assume control.
Aha, the penny drops as to why lefties are perpetual worryworts then.
AI now stands in the place of electromagnetism, chemistry, and other scientific wonders of the early 19th century, about which it has been said “What use is a newborn baby?” (variously attributed to Ben Franklin and Michael Faraday).
Here is one I have been suggesting to global warming catastrophists: electronic devices like cellphones will threaten extinction by interfering with the Earth’s magnetic field.
(I know. I know. But before you say that, just consider the statement “CO2 is the control knob of the climate.” Now come back to it. See? Look promising?)
My suggestion is that there will be a serious environmental clean-up issue as a result of millions of Trump opponents heads exploding. I thought American’s loved democracy?
Trump can’t stop all the evidence of the very real climate problems…
for example I expect (sadly) to see another record low in arctic sea ice this summer – lower than 2007/2016 for certain and maybe lower than 2012.
Still at record low extent…
Aww, poor griffie, no one is buying your sh*t, and we never will.
You mean we might have Holocene Optimum climate conditions in the near future? I wish…
Trump can’t change the climate. But he can dump those who “adjusted” the evidence to make it seem that Obama could.
“for example I expect (sadly) to see another record low in arctic sea ice this summer – lower than 2007/2016 for certain and maybe lower than 2012”
And this will be a problem why, precisely?
Have you apologised to Dr. Crockford for slandering her yet?
“Trump can’t stop all the evidence of the very real climate problems…”
Now recall Griff, Australian CSIRO estimate average global seal level rise over the 20th century at 1.6mm/yr. Then we have the geology of Hallett Cove showing an average sea level rise from 15000 yrs ago to 7000 years ago at 16.25mm/yr for EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS. Is it any wonder Trump can’t stop all that evidence of real climate change? Can Hilary trump that?
One would fully expect to see Arctic sea ice to diminish during inter-glacial periods. I will only worry if it starts growing.
But I’m a Canadian, so another ice age is the end of my country.
In the financial markets AI has been around for a long time.
You take an economist with PhD. in currency depreciation and place them at the head of the Federal Reserve System. They immediately become geniuses with supernatural powers.
–Artificial Intelligence–
It’s not AI, but your “it has to be…” list mostly nails it, Eric.
AI won’t threaten polar bears and AI can’t be used to continue to harm the developing world by keeping them in energy poverty. And AI can’t be used as a smoke screen for gaining control of energy and stifling capitalism while trying to destroy it.
The UN has been telegraphing what this next crisis is ever since The Pause.
It’s “biodiversity” and “species extinction”.
Nuclear power is a candidate?