Guest essay by Eric Worrall
As I predicted in 2017, the growing AI scare is looking increasingly likely to be the globalist replacement for the faltering climate scare.
Climate change, AI and harassment – the hottest topics at this year’s Davos
Richard Partington
Sun 21 Jan 2018 02.59 AEDT
The World Economic Forum focuses on the ‘fractured world’ this year: but the biggest star at the gala will be Donald Trump
Donald Trump will loom large at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos this week, as the self-styled anti-globalist joins the annual gathering of billionaires, business executives and politicians.
The meeting at the luxury ski resort in the Swiss Alps at the start of each year is set to be dominated by the US president, who is due to give a special address to the conference on Friday.
The official theme of this year’s forum is “creating a shared future in a fractured world”, which could have taken its cue from Trump alone. However, it does leave enough wiggle room to take in Brexit and the growing risks from technological advances, climate change and rising inequality.
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The rise of the robots
The increasing use of artificial intelligence, robotics and the automation of jobs has been a repeating theme at Davos, and this year is no different. The impact of AI will be one of the forum’s major events, with a one-to-one interview to be held between Schwab and the chief executive of Google, Sundar Pichai.
The “fourth industrial revolution” will be a key theme once more, with a focus on how the loss of millions of jobs could undermine social cohesion. The way states respond to governing and taxing technologies and borderless business will be high on the agenda.
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Climate-change risks to the fore
Trump moved quickly to pull the US out of the Paris climate accords in one of his first acts as president last year. At Davos, where the environment is always among the most important issues up for debate, this won’t have gone down well.
The former US vice-president Al Gore is attending and will speak on several panels, including one about how extreme weather events are proving more devastating and expensive.
The WEF’s global risks perception survey, released last week, cited climate change-related issues as the top problems facing the world, while it also issued a thinly veiled warning to the US president that “nation-state unilateralism” will make it harder to combat change and ecological damage.
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Climate with its failed predictions and repeated gross exaggerations simply doesn’t have the grant pulling power it once had. Climate disasters like melting ice sheets, once predicted to just be a decade away, have mostly been pushed out to the end of the century, well after most of us will be dead.
Compared to the tired climate myth, the scary AI narrative has real potential. We have all seen movies where a malevolent AI does great harm.
When will AI controlled robots steal all our jobs? What will contact with AI do to our children? Will militarised robots run amok and kill us all? Will AI help social justice warriors enslave us all, in a web of lies created by an intelligence we are helpless to resist? Do we have to regulate Facebook, Elon Musk and Google? Will AI deliver the stars, freedom, power and liberty beyond our ability to imagine?
Will AI solve deep medical mysteries and deliver the secret of medical immortality?
The national security implications – what if your nation’s enemies get there first? How many senior politicians or bureaucrats would reject a credible offer of an extra 50 years of healthy life, with more to come if they remain loyal to their new masters? Or a cure for a lethal illness, which only the advanced AI medical technology of your nation’s enemies can cure?
The new arms race – advanced AI is the only defence against advanced AI in the hands of ruthless enemies.
The most terrifying aspect of the AI scare – unlike increasingly distant climate threats, the AI revolution which upends all of our lives might happen tomorrow, before we can prepare.
This might be one of the last Davos meetings which even pretends to take the climate scare seriously. The AI scare is in – coming soon to your community.
From the article: “The meeting at the luxury ski resort in the Swiss Alps at the start of each year is set to be dominated by the US president, who is due to give a special address to the conference on Friday.”
This ought to be good. Trump is going to get up there and beat all these Eliteists over the head with his populist message.
I wish Trump could make it to Davos and give a speech calling for the establishment of a court of truth and reconciliation for climate change policy fraud along the lines of that truth court setup in South Africa under Mandela.
This truth and reconciliation court would lead to identifying the racketeer world wide.. This is long overdue.
From the article: “Trump moved quickly to pull the US out of the Paris climate accords in one of his first acts as president last year. At Davos, where the environment is always among the most important issues up for debate, this won’t have gone down well.”
Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall. A lot of these Elites are True Believers and have a lot of animosity towards Trump for his pulling out of the Paris Climate agreement.
The world’s Leaders and Elites are getting ready to meet a real leader.
That is unless the Shumer Shutdown (don’t you love it!) continues beyond the scheduled start of the conference and Trump has to miss attending.
I think it’s time to get rid of the 60 vote requirement in the U.S. Senate, and reduce it to 51 to pass a law. The only problem is there may be several Repubicans who would not vote for this. But if Shumer shuts down the goverment long enough, maybe they will change their minds.
The Senate has always been able to pass a law with a majority vote (51 votes today.) You obviously don’t know the difference between passing legislation and voting cloture.
Yes but the 60 vote rule on anything is just a rule adopted by the Senate. It is not in the Constitution. If fact, the rule used to be 2/3 (66) votes but the Democrats changed it back in the 70’s because they only had a majority of 62. Time to eliminate it all together so that actual voting on substantial matters can proceed.
The difference is meaningless. If the Democrats are going to filibuster everything, then it takes 60 votes to pass anything.
Not having 60 votes in the Senate reduced the damage the Democrats were able to do in Obama’s first two years.
Not having 60 votes in the Senate reduces the damage the Republicans are doing now.
Tom Bjorklund on January 21, 2018 at 8:43 am
Not having 60 votes in the Senate reduces the damage the Republicans are doing now.
Yep. All that damage of saving America. He should be ashamed.
If you don’t get the sarc you’re part of the reason we were floundering for eight years.
Funny how stopping socialism is so bad.
At least it is for those who would rather force other people to take care of them.
What is worse, the Terminator robot or Arnold S.?
Ahnold, obviously.
He’ll be back.
In order to at least try, this time, to give the illusion of being somewhat informed before making my typical comment I decided to look up the word ‘artificial’ so as to be certain of its meaning. This is what I found:
“(of a situation or concept) not existing naturally; contrived or false …”
Now, let us add the word ‘intelligence’ to ‘artificial’ and see what it means:
•intelligence that doesn’t exist naturally
•contrived intelligence
•false intelligence
After thus informing myself I think it’s rather bizarre that politicians, bureaucrats, and dignitaries to discuss exactly what they’ve represented for … well, forever.
I goofed. Last paragraph should read:
After thus informing myself I think it’s rather bizarre that politicians, bureaucrats, and dignitaries have gathered in a rather fancy vacation spot to discuss exactly what they’ve represented for … well, forever.
IF the “world leaders” who attend Davos in past decades were even moderately well-educated and intelligent, they would NOT have been obsessing about catastrophic man-made global warming and “climate change”. These are the popular manias of scoundrels and imbeciles – not of ethical, educated, intelligent people.
The demonization of increasing atmospheric CO2 has had several major impacts, all destructive to humanity:
1. The cost of energy has increased greatly in those venues that adopted worthless green energy schemes, which are not green and produce little useful (dispatchable) energy.
2. The reliability of electrical grids has been seriously compromised by the forced-installation of intermittent wind and solar power schemes.
3. The struggling peoples of the third world have been denied access to cheap, abundant, reliable energy, which could have saved millions of lives lost every year due to indoor air pollution from cooking and heating fires.
4. The trillions of dollars of scarce global resources misallocated on global warming hysteria could have been allocated to real pressing human priorities, such as installing clean water and sanitation systems, which would have saved the lives of many tens of millions of children and adults over past decades.
This is my “Go to hell warmist imbeciles” rant of the morning. The Sun is rising – time for coffee! It’s a sunny day in southern Alberta’s big blue sky.
Regards to all, Allan
Post Script:
The only measured impacts of increasing atmospheric CO2 are beneficial to humanity and the environment, These include increasing plant and crop yields and increased drought resistance, which has caused deserts to shrink. There is no actual catastrophic global warming caused by increasing atmospheric CO2, because climate has demonstrated a very low sensitivity to increasing CO2.
I just thought I’d toss in my two cents here.
Technology is now driving towards “mind reading” machines- no laughs, the idea of controlling machinery by thought alone is not a new one, and we are nobly trying to restore mobility to the paralyzed.
The problem that I see with this is twofold, what will AI think of our own thought processes (!), and what is the government likely to do with the newly available information? ThoughtCrime, indeed.
We have entered a brave new world, one in which rigorous training in logic, math, medicine, et.al., will be “outsourced” to machines with no experience in feelings, biological urges and imperatives, and all the other things that make us human. There is no roadmap for where we are going.
There’s no mind reading going on. There’s a monitoring of neural impulses that should be moving muscles, if said muscles were working, and that is all. Very laudable.
Artificial intelligence should be better than natural intelligence. It should not have the “circle of life” influences that allow emotions not logic to make decisions. But notice how different cultures have such different values that come from tradition not logic. Also, it should have a wider viewpoint avoiding the narrow and unthinking child like ideas that pop up in human thinking. But the real question is will it be subject to corruption as humans are.
Nothing new here, people were expressing the same concerns about AI 20 years ago. There are two approached to AI, model human behavior and model the human brain. Behavior is the reflexive approach, we all know how humans behave so you just have to make a massive data base of appropriate responses to given stimuli and let the robot access it. The other is to model the human brain, the actual neural networks of the brain, so the robot then programs itself through interaction with the environment and through trial and error and learns and becomes intelligent the same way we do. The first approach is easy and that’s mostly what AI people do and they end up with Siri and Alexa. The second approach is very hard, with all sorts of hardware limitations, and so far as I know, there are no mechanical intelligences that could be recognized as entities that have been generated by this method (but I haven’t looked at it for 20 years or more . . . I’m assuming had there been any they would be famous). Alexa and Siri and all their descendants are no threat to humanity. It’s the Terminators that are scary.
AI is a great substitute for AGW for the alarmist community because I think we are much further from solving the neural network model than determining the nature of any danger from CO2 in the atmosphere. At some point in the future we will develop mechanical intelligence and even if they turn out to be mild mannered reporter type robots the fear will be multiplied and so the funds for research will flow.
Eric, first, the Grey Cardinal billionaires now know climate is a bust for their purposes. They won’t waste time and resources shoring up faltering memes. The main climate hysterians will be those with climate as the name of their job titles mainly in academia and NGO players. Politicians will simply change the names of their ministries. Civil servants will retire, change their job descriptions and the rest will move on. NASA will chop off redundant divisions and get back to propulsing jets and things.The pain will be worst in entire academic faculties created for the purpose. Even the wily foundations can change horses quickly – hey, their medium is multipurpose cash.
With it all, will go the fungus that grows around these things: safe places, the multi new “disciplines” under corrupted sociological rubrics, diversity provosts, women’s studies (isn’t this a “racist” activity already), Feminine Glaciology-type degree mills. Gender proliferations that are running out of alphabet, as budgets tighten.
Maybe “diversity” will morph back into diversity of ideas and this old “silver” guy can be released in his dotage after declaring a mistrial on my role in creating, aiding and abetting The Magna Carta, the Age of Enlightenment, The Industrual Revolution, the Space Age, the Electronic Age and other high crimes.
There is always a new fungus, it’s an ongoing effort to stop the rot from taking over…
If DAVOS is so worried about humanity being replaced by AI then don’t build it, it’s that simple. Don’t get into a competition to see who can build the machine that replaces humanity, then cry about how safeguards need to be adopted.
No choice. If you don’t build AI your competition will, they will use AI to undercut and destroy your business. So you have to get there first.
The ‘AI threat’ is the result of the Frankenstein Myth, which holds that our creations will eventually turn on us, but as popular as this myth is in our movies and entertainment, it has never happened. So far, all machines remain unconscious, and have no ability to make a decision that is contrary to its programing and design. (The same is also almost true for humans, but not quite.) We can build devices and program them to attack us. That is not the same thing as machines turning against us.
In the Frankenstein Myth, we always anthropomorphize our creations, giving them human personalities, complete with the worst aspects of the human species; fear, jealousy, hatred, paranoia and so on. I find this assumption completely unfounded, as these human foibles are not derived from intelligence, but from tens of thousands of years of human experience and evolution. True artificial intelligence is only perceived as a threat due to our human insecurities. There is a very real threat, however, while our machines are no more that an extension of human intelligence; doing only what humans have programed them to do.
I greatly look forward to the ‘singularity’ when real machine intelligence surpases human intelligence.
“Will AI deliver the stars, freedom, power and liberty beyond our ability to imagine?” Absolutely, if HS (human stupidity) doesn’t kill us all first!
From the Matrix:
“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.”
Perhaps Mr Smith was correct.
Except that is not true. Birth rates all over the world are declining.
It’s also not true that animals develop a natural equilibrium with their environment.
Absent man, animal populations are constantly building and collapsing as animals have as many babies as they can until they use up the available food sources.
There’s a lot of talk about machines taking jobs, but there are robots for special purposes that might be more of a problem. Men can buy “the perfect female”. Reports are some men are even marrying these robots. Brothels are using them instead of the real women. I suppose it’s a dream come true or a nightmare, depending on one’s view of romance and marriage.
“Or a cure for a lethal illness, which only the advanced AI medical technology of your nation’s enemies can cure?”
Do you suppose that is why Orrin Hatch is pushing so hard for med pot? A guy who would normally be against cannabis. (once medical is entertained – recreational is not too far behind).
What happens when Russians have to come here (or Israel) for their med pot treatments? It happened in the old Soviet Union for more mundane medical treatments.
I’m fairly certain that if the Russians decide they want medical pot, they will be able to figure out how to grow their own.
There are so many interesting tangents to the discussion of AI. For me, the most interesting is that AI is discussed as a property of inanimate things when we’re only beginning to understand the I part of AI in ourselves.
What defines intelligence? Logical, rational thinking – the ability to solve problems; creativity – the ability to produce something new that has never existed before, or have an original thought? What is an original thought? Where do they come from? Does the universe just drop them into our heads or are they the result of some form of processing on our accumulated experiences? If the latter, what does that say about free will versus predetermination? Was it possible to not have that thought and have another instead?
I think that AI will be unattainable until we can begin to answer these questions and more about ourselves.
If any of these questions are of interest to you as well, this Ted talk will fascinate you. It doesn’t directly address them, but it does begin to expose the challenges in answering them. Jill Bolte Tayler, brain researcher gives a touching, emotional talk about the self-analysis of her brain functions as they shut down one by one while she experiences a stroke.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight
Yes Please! sign me up for a seminar on Weather Science with a speaker who took 1 science class at college in which he managed a “Gentlemen C”
I would have that Al senior could have bought him a better grade. But what do I know – I had to actually study.
A ray of hope flickers in its eye (remember Terminator)
A tiny spark lights up in its thigh.
All across the land dawns a brand new PORN.
This come to pass when AI is born.
The recent uptick in chatter about AI made me assume that some actual technical advances had been made by computer builders and programmers in getting to the heart of what architectures and algorithms are needed in – say – the human brain to achieve conscious thought.
But in response to this article I read around a little, and now have the strong impression that this optimistic impression was false. Scientific references – such as they are – to AI feature predominantly scifi writers like Ray Kurzweil. The AI narrative is just more run of the mill dystopia with no sound basis in theory or experiment.
Its just a new tributary of fictitious bullshit joining with the climate change river of the same.
I was disappointed with myself for being so naive. As if today’s scientific community is still even capable of real technical advances. Scientists are selected for viscious infighting and political sailing with the wind. Not actually anything as right-wing and politically dangerous as actually understanding a natural or physical process or system. Why can’t we even find new antibiotics? Or make big batteries for those windmills? What of computers, cars, planes and rockets? Or genetically modified crops? Our flagship technologies have stopped advancing and begun deteriorating, retreating in the face of political headwinds.
No – a scientific community whose consensus has swallowed the CAGW catastrophism – this same community is somehow going to unlock adaptive hypernetworked intelligence in a computer? I don’t think so.
Back in the 60’s we could put people on the moon. I’m glad I was 4 years old in 1969 and was woken up at night to see the landing (we lived in Malaysia) although I don’t remember it. It will never happen again.
Artificial intelligence? ROTFL 😂 A more realistic objective would be try try to preserve a remnant of humans intelligence from totalitarian purges driven by anti-technology dystopian mass paranoia.
Absolutely – I did say it was the new scare 😉
As someone that deals with AI in my job I’m quite skeptical of that “robot apocalypse” myself. The admittedly impressive advances that we see here and there nowadays are nothing but the swan song of Moore’s Law, may peace be upon it. I think that we will see some marginal improvements over what we already have over the next years, but that will be it.
Nevertheless, the globalists have a golden opportunity for pushing their insidious agenda using AI as a boogeyman, for as we can see in this thread it seems that even climate skeptics are emotionally impressed by science fiction images of robots with red eyes killing people.
Ha ha ha, I was reading the article with dirty glasses, and it looked to me that the term AI (AY EYE) was Al (Albert Gore). I finally realized my mistake, but until then, my misinterpretation was funny as hell. I recommend everyone go back and read the article that way.
By the way, if any robotic AI wants to come for me for the purposes of enslavement, consumption or disembowelment, could you please, at least make it one of those hot chick bots that the kid (played by Shia LaBeuf) had angling for him in Transformers II? Thanks in advance.
I thought it meant AL as well. Al is in Davos mouthing off. Okay.
The qualitative distinction between the two is important.
While it can certainly produce some great scare stories, A.I. at least has the merit that it is usually built with the express purpose of actually trying to do something useful.
By contrast, the global-warming scare is entirely negative. It is the product of thought processes that build nothing useful, probably never have, and probably never intend to.
I wonder where all these jobs are going to come from.
In the 1970’s I was head of an engineering design department with 40 engineers reporting to me. We acquired a CAD system. A year later it was me and ten engineers. I don’r know where the other 30 eventually went.
Computers replacing lawyers? Generally a good idea, but as someone said: “Show me the man, and I will tell you the crime.” Computers will be so good at that.
Similarly, self driving cars? When the government wants to talk to you, they just tell the car where to take you. You are never seen again.
Self driving cars work in urban centers, but cannot handle dirt roads, and offroading. They also don’t work in mountains without a GPS signal. The main problem is that all driving liability becomes the cost of the manufacturer and cities loose vast revenue unable to give out tickets. I have never seen one parallel park and probably won’t soon. How they handle ice, rain, potholess remains to be seen. How does a LIDAR find a pothole? A dog in front of the car? Recognize a ball crossing a street and understand a child is probably following it? I think it is bunk technology.
In the 90’s working at a research group with Hughes Aircraft, we had a lecture given to us by the AI group director. His analysis was that AI goes in euphoria cycles every 20 years. However, the reality of capturing the knowledge of an expert and making judgment decisions is an extraordinarily complex and costly task that did not have good solutions in the mid 90’s. A new generation has arrived 20 years down the road and Musk has got AI religion. Good for him. In the 90’s they were trying the LISP language to capture syntax and had LISP super processor workstations. The task in that group was mundane maintenance repair assistance. Every little thing takes a lot of complex study and review where the questions arise like: What is knowledge? What is data? When is data a fad? How do you account for errors in data and incomplete data and contradicting data? What is an opinion? What is an expert and how is one better than others? The murky problems are just vast.
As a Grauniad commenter said, the real danger with AIs is not their existence per se, but if they start developing an ideology.
The majority of mass slaughters in human history have been not over property but over ideologies. The war to end life on Earth might not be between us and AIs either, it might even be between AI factions of the SAME ideology with slightly differing interpretations of the doctrine.
Asimov missed out a Law: A robot shall never engage in religion.
A cult IS a robot. And so is a cultist, in many respect.