Essay by Eric Worrall
The red flag – the people hyping the AI apocalypse are mostly the same people who promised us a climate crisis for all these years.
Hope for an AI doomer: ‘Laudato Si’ ‘ predicted today’s technology threats
April 4, 2024
BY SCOTT HURD
View Author ProfileI am a major league catastrophizer. I have an uncanny and unsettling tendency to anticipate disaster at every turn. I see glasses half-empty, plan vacations with detailed spreadsheets and arrive at my departure gate two hours early. Risk management is my superpower. If you or your organization need someone to forecast worst-case scenarios, I am happy to help, and I charge on a sliding scale.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I am an “AI doomer” — I see generative artificial intelligence as an existential threat, in spite of the saturation-level hype surrounding its potential. And I am not alone.
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There are good reasons to be concerned, if today’s headlines are to be believed. Because according to certain experts, we’ll all either end up worshiping robots, be annihilated by robots, become unemployed by robots or be fused with robots until our consciousnesses are uploaded into the cloud.
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I’ve been finding solace and encouragement, however, in Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical addressing another existential threat: climate change. “The work of the Church,” Francis insists, quoting Benedict XVI, is to “protect mankind from self-destruction.”
And Francis’ proposals to do this can easily be applied to AI, because climate change and AI present strikingly similar dangers involving power concentrated in the hands of a few, and multinational companies. They create what Francis calls a “technocratic paradigm” in which “life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology, itself viewed as the principal key to the meaning of existence.”
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Read more: https://www.ncronline.org/earthbeat/science/hope-ai-doomer-laudato-si-predicted-todays-technology-threats
Hollywood artists are also horrified human performers will shortly become surplus to requirements, that soon we might not need to put up with their political posturing and far left green hypocrisy.
Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Camila Cabello Sign Open Letter Warning About AI Threat to Artists
Around 200 artists, including Sam Smith, HYBE, Jon Bon Jovi and Norah Jones, raised an alarm on artificial intelligence producing vocal “copycats” that threaten to replace popular artists and creators.
BY ETAN VLESSING
APRIL 2, 2024 7:44AMThe Artists Rights Alliance, backed by around 200 music artists including Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry and Camila Cabello, has released an open letter calling on digital music developers to “cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”
The campaign raised the alarm on the the use of musical works by AI developers that without permission train and produce AI “copycats,” or use AI “sound” to dilute royalty obligations. Their intervention came as the threat from AI to creators, and its value to tech giants, is an increasing focus for the legal and pop music fields.
“Working musicians are already struggling to make ends meet in the streaming world, and now they have the added burden of trying to compete with a deluge of AI-generated noise. The unethical use of generative AI to replace human artists will devalue the entire music ecosystem — for artists and fans alike,” Jen Jacobsen, executive director of the ARA, said in a statement.
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Read more: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/billie-eilish-nicki-minaj-open-letter-ai-1235864532/
Microsoft has issued a warning that China is trying to influence elections in the USA and elsewhere using AI.
China tests US voter fault lines and ramps AI content to boost its geopolitical interests
Apr 4, 2024 | Clint Watts – General Manager, Microsoft Threat Analysis Center
China is using fake social media accounts to poll voters on what divides them most to sow division and possibly influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in its favor. China has also increased its use of AI-generated content to further its goals around the world. North Korea has increased its cryptocurrency heists and supply chain attacks to fund and further its military goals and intelligence collection. It has also begun to use AI to make its operations more effective and efficient.
These are among the Microsoft Threat Intelligence insights in the latest East Asia report published today by the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) – Same targets, new playbooks: East Asia threat actors employ unique methods.
Three key findings emerge in the report:
Deceptive social media accounts by Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-affiliated actors have started to pose contentious questions on controversial U.S. domestic issues to better understand the key issues that divide U.S. voters. This could be to gather intelligence and precision on key voting demographics ahead of the U.S. presidential election.
There has been an increased use of Chinese AI-generated content in recent months, attempting to influence and sow division in the U.S. and elsewhere on a range of topics including: the train derailment in Kentucky in November 2023, the Maui wildfires in August 2023, the disposal of Japanese nuclear wastewater, drug use in the U.S. as well as immigration policies and racial tensions in the country. There is little evidence these efforts have been successful in swaying opinion.
China’s geopolitical priorities remain unchanged but it has doubled down on its targets and increased the sophistication of its influence operations (IO) attacks. These priorities are:
- The South Pacific islands
- The South China Sea region
- The U.S. defense industrial base
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Read more: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2024/04/04/china-ai-influence-elections-mtac-cybersecurity/
AIs are also increasingly being used to produce kill lists and guide increasingly sophisticated weapons – I leave it to readers to search out those stories.
Times tells us AI poses an extinction level threat;
Exclusive: U.S. Must Move ‘Decisively’ to Avert ‘Extinction-Level’ Threat From AI, Government-Commissioned Report Says
MARCH 11, 2024 9:00 AM EDT
The U.S. government must move “quickly and decisively” to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an “extinction-level threat to the human species,” says a report commissioned by the U.S. government published on Monday.
“Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security,” the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. “The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.” AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less.
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Read more: https://time.com/6898967/ai-extinction-national-security-risks-report/
George Soros warned us in 2023 that AI is a bigger threat than climate change;
Why is AI suddenly such a big deal?
As I have long predicted, AI is the perfect drop in replacement for the climate scare. In fact the AI threat is better – unlike the climate scare, AI scares have bipartisan appeal.
Biden has promised to clamp down on this high priority threat.
FACT SHEET: President Biden Issues Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
Today, President Biden is issuing a landmark Executive Order to ensure that America leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of artificial intelligence (AI). The Executive Order establishes new standards for AI safety and security, protects Americans’ privacy, advances equity and civil rights, stands up for consumers and workers, promotes innovation and competition, advances American leadership around the world, and more.
As part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s comprehensive strategy for responsible innovation, the Executive Order builds on previous actions the President has taken, including work that led to voluntary commitments from 15 leading companies to drive safe, secure, and trustworthy development of AI.
The Executive Order directs the following actions:
New Standards for AI Safety and SecurityAs AI’s capabilities grow, so do its implications for Americans’ safety and security. With this Executive Order, the President directs the most sweeping actions ever taken to protect Americans from the potential risks of AI systems:
- Require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government. In accordance with the Defense Production Act, the Order will require that companies developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety must notify the federal government when training the model, and must share the results of all red-team safety tests. These measures will ensure AI systems are safe, secure, and trustworthy before companies make them public.
- Develop standards, tools, and tests to help ensure that AI systems are safe, secure, and trustworthy. The National Institute of Standards and Technology will set the rigorous standards for extensive red-team testing to ensure safety before public release. The Department of Homeland Security will apply those standards to critical infrastructure sectors and establish the AI Safety and Security Board. The Departments of Energy and Homeland Security will also address AI systems’ threats to critical infrastructure, as well as chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cybersecurity risks. Together, these are the most significant actions ever taken by any government to advance the field of AI safety.
- Protect against the risks of using AI to engineer dangerous biological materials by developing strong new standards for biological synthesis screening. Agencies that fund life-science projects will establish these standards as a condition of federal funding, creating powerful incentives to ensure appropriate screening and manage risks potentially made worse by AI.
- Protect Americans from AI-enabled fraud and deception by establishing standards and best practices for detecting AI-generated content and authenticating official content. The Department of Commerce will develop guidance for content authentication and watermarking to clearly label AI-generated content. Federal agencies will use these tools to make it easy for Americans to know that the communications they receive from their government are authentic—and set an example for the private sector and governments around the world.
- Establish an advanced cybersecurity program to develop AI tools to find and fix vulnerabilities in critical software, building on the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing AI Cyber Challenge. Together, these efforts will harness AI’s potentially game-changing cyber capabilities to make software and networks more secure.
- Order the development of a National Security Memorandum that directs further actions on AI and security, to be developed by the National Security Council and White House Chief of Staff. This document will ensure that the United States military and intelligence community use AI safely, ethically, and effectively in their missions, and will direct actions to counter adversaries’ military use of AI.
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Read more: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/10/30/fact-sheet-president-biden-issues-executive-order-on-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-artificial-intelligence/
The UN recently acted to contain the AI threat;
UN approves its first resolution on artificial intelligence
The UN General Assembly has called for a set of international guidelines to address the risks and benefits of AI.
The United Nations General Assembly has unanimously adopted the first global resolution on artificial intelligence to encourage the protection of personal data, the monitoring of AI for risks, and the safeguarding of human rights.
The resolution, sponsored by the United States and co-sponsored by 123 countries, was adopted by consensus with a bang of the gavel and without a vote on Thursday, meaning it has the support of all 193 UN member nations.
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Read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/21/the-un-approves-its-first-resolution-on-artificial-intelligence
And the EU is deeply concerned about unregulated artificial intelligence;
Artificial Intelligence Act: deal on comprehensive rules for trustworthy AI
09-12-2023 – 00:04
- Safeguards agreed on general purpose artificial intelligence
- Limitation for the of use biometric identification systems by law enforcement
- Bans on social scoring and AI used to manipulate or exploit user vulnerabilities
- Right of consumers to launch complaints and receive meaningful explanations
- Fines ranging from 35 million euro or 7% of global turnover to 7.5 million or 1.5% of turnover
MEPs reached a political deal with the Council on a bill to ensure AI in Europe is safe, respects fundamental rights and democracy, while businesses can thrive and expand.
On Friday, Parliament and Council negotiators reached a provisional agreement on the Artificial Intelligence Act. This regulation aims to ensure that fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability are protected from high risk AI, while boosting innovation and making Europe a leader in the field. The rules establish obligations for AI based on its potential risks and level of impact.
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Read more: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20231206IPR15699/artificial-intelligence-act-deal-on-comprehensive-rules-for-trustworthy-ai
Why do I think the fake AI threat is all hype?
Does this AI frighten you?
Feeling scared yet? How about this AI, which generates fake climate psychology papers?
Artificial intelligences are tools. At their current state of development, and for the plausibly foreseeable future, claiming artificial intelligence is a threat to our existence is like claiming your toaster or your screwdriver is a threat to our existence.
Military AIs are scary – but so are ICBMs and helicopters with machine guns.
As threats arise, countermeasures will be developed, in much the same way as computer viruses are countered by anti-virus packages. The chances of a single nation or group being in a position to threaten the entire world with their AI breakthrough is insignificant – about the same as a single nation or group being in a position to threaten the entire world with an apocalypse computer virus. Great plot for a thriller movie, but utterly unrealistic.
If you are still unconvinced the AI threat is all hype, the real red flag should be, the people who are hyping the imaginary AI threat are mostly the same clowns who hype the climate threat.
AI in my opinion is what Covid is what climate is what all the previous fake scare stories have been and always will be – a useful political prop to stampede voters into undermining their own freedom and prosperity.
HAL: “I’m sorry Dave. I can’t do that.” “2001: a space odyssey” played in 1968.
AI fear hype has been around for a long time.
And fear sells, Rud.
my all time favorite film
The book was better.
But watching the movie at a drive in on a psychedelic was pretty groovy. 🙂
“George Soros: AI is a Bigger Problem than Climate Change”
A mole hill is bigger than an ant hill.
The mountain is Climate Change mitigation.
Open the pod bay door HAL
I’m sorry Dave. I can’t do that.
Pretend you are a Boeing 737
WOOSH!
I have long had a theory / prediction that sometime soon, the bottom is going to drop out of Hollywood. Movie will be generated on the fly. You will choose a script, the “actors”, “director”, locations (real or artificial or from any time), and watch it as it is generated. Or you will tweak it as you want.
The trick will be that the cast and crew will be nothing but computer instructions. Zillions of parameters to tweak. Companies will develop these, people well circulate their own, and the world of $50M a movie actors will dwindle and disappear. Live human acting will be reserved for real theaters, and while recordings of those performances may circulate, the big budget movie will be strictly artificial. Acting will be the old-style start-to-finish-in-one-performance kind of thing. No one will want to waste an entire day setting up and shooting 2 minutes of a two hour movie.
I’m looking forward to it immensely. Because those live theater performances will have such limited audiences, actors won’t be overpaid and won’t have so much idle time to mouth off on things of which they know nothing.
Movie will be generated on the fly.
Bowfinger.
I think this is already the case. I recently had the misfortune to watch a routine Hollywood action movie while on a plane. Most of the film was CGI car chases and helicopter sequences interspersed with abysmal live action scenes. The plot was perfunctory and as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.
For some reason, movie makers think cops chasing bad guys is a plus. I consider it a total waste of film/video time. Even when they completely surround the bad guy’s house, he still escapes–then we have to watch a stupid chase scene.
“I see glasses half-empty, plan vacations with detailed spreadsheets”
I would suggest some counselling but then most psychs are far more UNhinged than their clients
If you were an engineer you would see a glass that is twice the size that it needs to be.
Evolution has given us all powerful horsesh*t detectors. Use yours. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
Actually, evolution gave some of us brains to not even be fooled once. Those that regularly win the Darwin award are fooled continuously–they never learn. It’s amazing that they still survive to breed.
If the regular propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party is anything to go by then not even AI will help them leave the era of Stalin, Mao, and the earliest TV commercials.
If the formula that Hollywood and Netflix uses continues, there will have to be a separate subscription for old-school “boy meets girl, fall in love, get married, have a family” type scripts.
Next version of “Silence Of The Lambs” will probably feature Clarence and Hannibal making up a 3-some with Jame Gumb.
Uh?
Which is exactly what my reaction would be if Clarice became Clarence.
Clarise as a trans-woman, of course.
I thought the Muppets were the greatest movie actors of all time, so I don’t see AI-generated imitations of human characters and voices all that troubling. 🙂
And when they start making fake Trump news clips? At least now they need actual footage to edit into fake news. With AI, they can just generate it.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women
AI seems to have a leftist bias so I would rename it Artificial Indoctrination
It’s not a very scary boogeyman.
AI is like a well rehearsed in leftism person who knows the leftist narratives but does not call people a science denier, or Big Oil grifter or MAGA fascist. A polite leftist
The purpose of a leftist boogeyman is to scare people and help implement the Transition to Leftist Fascism
I propose a real scary boogeyman instead of AI: The coming invasion of aliens from the planet Uranus. And only a leftist fascist government could stop that invasion Just like leftist fascism is the only way to stop climate change.
I’m not interested in some imaginary bunch of aliens you just pulled out of Uranus, nor am I particularly interested in your theories of what will or will not stop an imaginary problem. AI is just a complex computer program that does a huge number of binary calculations faster than a human could do them and, as such, is being touted as a substitute for actual human thinking. AI will kill off human ingenuity and creativity leaving us with a very bleak outlook.
They said the same thing about automobiles, computers, manufacturing robots, and the internet.
100% of prediction of doom have been wrong throughout history, and you just don’t see a trend?
Oh I see a trend alright. It’s just that, unlike you, I see human ingenuity and creativity has already begun a decline thanks to some of the things you cite and AI will just continue the downwards trend. It’s not so much fear of the boogeyman as disappointment that we appear to be going down the wrong path.
Old pothole-Pete is saying the same nonsense about EVs. There is absolutely no support of total EV conversion by our electrical grid. But, hey, we don’t care! We will switch to EVs, destroy the FF industry, and renewables will save us–it’s a death cult.
Sometimes predictions are right, sometimes they are wrong, sometimes they are partly right.
Your belief that because some predictions were wrong, all future predictions will also be wrong is not scientific.
It’s always interesting that you are on the verge of saying something smart, and then you don’t.
You may be juts smart enough to throw down the generic insults, but you are not smart enough to fact check my comments.
To paraphrase Forest Gump: “Smart is as smart does.”
Fear is a natural human state. In the not-so-long-ago past, fear kept us alive. Fear is so powerful that many people invent things to fear.
Fear is also a great way to control people. If people are fearful enough, they aren’t thinking rationally. Micheal Crichton explored this theme in his aptly titled novel State of Fear.
Yes, people these days even feign fear (and offence) on behalf of other people they’ve never met, or never likely to meet.
It’s called “wokeism”.
Wokeachusetts
All I read here was that world governments and national governments are preparing to step in and protect me. How are they going to do this? By taking money from others and almost certainly infringing on my rights and liberties. They can’t or won’t stop hacking. Give me a break.
When I see the UN getting involved, to “protect” us…
Now that is a real worry !!
From the paper in the article;
Says it all, really.
If I were a writer at a newspaper or magazine I’d be wearing my brown trousers on a daily basis, but LLM’s are not AGI. They have no inherent motivation. They’ll spout out almost-reasonable text if you ask, or images of people with too many fingers and not enough legs, but they’re only tools.
What makes the hype ridiculous is we have basically no idea how thought, knowledge or learning work in humans so we are not about to program a machine to emulate it.
However when trying to get a bill paying or shopping problem solved I expect to soon get this message: “We’re sorry but there are no humans at this number.”
That has already been the case for some time now, minus the admission. ONe can only choose from a menu of predefined options for pre-generated responses; nothing else is available.
The edit has gone psychotic, treating attempts at correcting the text as posting a duplicate comment, and not allowing the edit to be saved.
A post I was trying to sort out a couple of days ago got labelled as ‘spam’ and sent to moderation for no clear reason.
They’ve turned Charles into an algorithm.
I just had a post about Antarctica on another thread listed as waiting for approval even though I got the ‘howdy’ message when I logged on.
The “Travelling Salesman” thing is hardly an AI.
It is just a basic mathematical “genetic optimisation” algorithm.
AI is hardly what I would call AI either, just a complex random answer generator.
TS learns by experience (partial previous solutions) and approaches a solution through a complex problem space, so I would argue it is a true AI. One of these days I’ll create a NEAT implementation in HTML /Javascript and you’ll see neurones doing their thing.
How do we know this article was not written by A. I. Worrall, while E. Worrall was drinking beer?
You don’t 😉
Single objective, find shortest linear path without re-visit.
Does it by starting with a random path then gradually iterating in…. It is purely mathematical.
The word “generations” gives it away as a genetic algorithm.
Now try working with multi-objective, multi-decision, network linear programming. 😉
AIs will soon have their own niche in the DEI scheme.
Putting AI control into the hands of government bureaucracies will ensure AIs are used to enhance bureaucratic budgets, organizational strengths, and controls over “governance” by law to favor governance by bureaucrats.
The other day, VP Harris declared in an interview that the makers of AI would have to prove that their products aren’t racist before they can be allowed to be used by doctors.
On the other hand, a hospital in, I believe Delaware, has declared that they are going to cut down on the number of children being reported as victims of abuse. Seems to many minorities were being reported.
G’Day Mark,
“…as victims of abuse.”
Not physical or mental “abuse”, but being born with traces of various drugs in their systems passed along by their mothers.
The A.I. system on my laptop is pretty smart. It uses internet searches to find all the info you ask for. It is not much different than the Google search engine in that respect. But I also asked it to write a poem for my wife. It did a better job than I could have done.
If you ask it to “define a woman” it will give a much better answer than a certain SCOTUS justice.
And we all know that an A.I. chess program beat the human chess champ. The same is true for the Chinese game Go and the TV game Jeopardy. So A. I. Is already doing some things humans can’t do. It has the potential to do great good. It is already being used to help find cures for certain diseases. But it also has the potential to do great harm. Some pretty smart people like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have cautioned about it. What will A.I. do when it realizes it is smarter than we are? Will it ask what do I need these dopes for? Will it view us as an unnecessary drain on resources and then try to eliminate us?
I usually think of technology as being neither good nor bad. It is just the use to which it is put that can be good or bad. But A.1 is the exception to that. It has the potential to get away from us.
Exactly. Guns don’t kill people; people with guns do.
The AI that Musk and Hawking warned you about is not this AI. This AI is likely a dead-end answer-bot that will never lead to true AI.
Back when I was in college, I wished that someone would create an implantable math co-processor. That and an implantable memory device large enough to hold all my text books for each quarter.
‘Some pretty smart people like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have cautioned about it.’
I saw far too many video interviews in the alarmist media where a fully paralyzed Hawking ‘spoke’ about the dangers of climate change without a single glitch. Call me a cynic, but I’d take anything Hawking ‘cautioned’ about with a grain of salt.
I remember one interview in which Hawkins predicted that the Earth could end up looking like Venus if we didn’t immediately cut back CO2 emissions.
Hawking and Kip Thorne made a wager about Cyg X-1 being a black hole. Hawking admitted to losing that bet. Hawking was completely taken in on the climate change hoax. He was wrong about that too.
The old joke goes: “Economists have successfully predicted nine of the last three recessions.”.
Yes, we are getting endless scare stories. Yes, they are all coming from the same people. Yes, those people are all from the left. Yes, AI looks like the next one to take over when the climate scare finally fails. Yes, AI can be used to benefit humanity. But NO, AI is not something that we can be relaxed about.
Those same people who have been scaring some people literally to death with “climate change”, who have caused enormous waste of public money, who have destroyed our electricity systems, and who have caused honest scientists and others an enormous amount of effort to combat them, have found a new tool The tool itself has the potential to be enormously beneficial, but these people don’t see it that way, they see it as a tool that they can use to dominate other people. You can see that they are already doing that, because of the obvious left-wing bias in the publicly accessible AIs. And you know that the Chinese and Russians are already using it against the west.
AI is already in the wrong hands. We have a new fight on ours. Not against AI as such, but against the miserable lot who are already weaponising it against us.
US economist, as a group, have never predicted a recession.
They do this because predicting a good year will typically be right for 9 years out of 10.
Predicting a recession that does not happen could get them fired
90% right with no chance of being fired if you never predict a recession.
A recession often officially defined 6 months after it starts, so you get quite a few months to “predict” a recession after it has started, but before the NBER recognized it as a recession
One of the more accurate leading recession indicators is Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance, released every Thursday. I wrote a for profit economics newsletter with several hundred subscribers for 43 years.
I see you missed the whole point of the comment.
You write:
“Economists have successfully predicted nine of the last three recessions.”.
That claim is not even close to being true. I provided the correct information. Economists rarely predict recessions. There are a few perma-bear economists who are almost always predicting a recession, but they are rare, and also irrelevant
The fact is that very few economists have ever predicted a recession. And your 9 of 5 myth is the opposite of reality.
It is my opinion that most readers here are interested in the truth, even if fact checking disturbs your ego.
And once again, the self declared expert continues to miss the point.
Do these morons not know it is just a computer, only does what it is programed to do and don’t do shyte after power is turned off? Really?
Yeah, pull the plug on AI.
John Connor showed us the way, no biggee!
And Sleepy Joe done got the answer, anyways! Shut down all the electricity production in America and AI is a problem that vanishes. Whoosh!!!!
Next time you call your Cable provider for help or assistance in resetting your WiFi or eliminating any of the common problems pay careful attention to the choices giving by the BOT advising you press 1 for English, press 2 for Spanish, Press 3 for that, press 4 for whatever, press 5 for something else, etc., etc, etc, and as soon as you select one and press that number you get about 6 more, ad infinitum, THAT IS AI.
THAT IS AI
so all about eliminating potential usefulness of humans ?….hopefully they don’t get control of many drones….
There is no AI in such automated systems.
Why is it that the EnviroWaco’s claiming that CO2 must be decreased and the deniers must be punished or even put in jail, give one whit about what happens to the typical forest that is no longer being maintained the way that nature itself maintained it thousands, millions, billions of years ago? And that means declaring that “Virgin Forests” should have any forest fire extinguished immediately!.
For the twenty years I grew up on a prospering farm, we also maintained the historical natural forest on our property by eliminating the presence of overgrowth of fire feeding underbrush by removing it annually with a brush-hog. I now live next to a 100 acre plot of land where the EnviroWaco has done nothing to over 50 acers of land for the last 35 years. Worse, the land is so overgrown that a tractor could not get between the trees and during dry years at least ten percent die from lack of water, many over 50 ft tall. NOTHING. Last year was very dry and it was common to hear large branches “Dry Fall” from the lack of water. .
The land was grazing area for horse owners that used it to stable their horses as it was not in the City proper but in the county. Thirty years ago the owner passed away and the two daughters lived in the house and did NOTHING to the horse pasture and no longer boarded horses, The land now looks like the forest you see in films on TV or theaters depicting the wicked witch’s home. The fallen trees alone could supply firewood for 20 homes for twenty plus years. I seriously doubt that the local Volunteer Fire Dept could extinguish a fire in that mismanaged area. And since it is less than 20 feet from my house even my home will end up as ashes.
I understand your predicament. I sometimes feel that the whole of western society is insane, but there are in fact some brave commenters in the media still plugging away for sanity. Somehow, though, here in Australia, no-one in the media ever says “no fuel, no fire”. No-one ever advises communities to clear the land around them. If anyone does, the authorities come down on them like a ton of bricks. The last time bushfires came through our area, some locals got out and bulldozed a swathe of bush, saving a lot of properties. The community recognised them as heroes. The authorities – silence. They knew they couldn’t prosecute heroes, but they couldn’t acknowledge that the bush should have been kept clear all the time. So nothing has changed.
Now, do you have a bulldozer, or know a good person with a bulldozer …..
The boreal forest has been with us since the glaciers retreated. At least 8000 years. Yet the average age of trees is only around 100 years despite possible lifespans of hundreds of years.
Obviously forest fires, disease, pestilence, extreme weather, would be ongoing factors. But it turns out the main factor is traceable by ash deposits in the bottom of boreal lakes….that the mean time between forest fire conflagrations as calculated by various studies turns out to be about 90 to 140 years. Apparently the FRI (Fire Return Index) shows more wildfire lately. Could it be maybe more runaway campfires ? More smaller fires around lakes that end up getting analyzed due to human fire intervention or road access ?
So the northern forests in Canada and the Brazilian Rain forest regenerate from fire every couple of centuries despite various extremist claims of “Lungs of the Planet” crisis.
One such study:
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.2287
The oceans have always been the “lungs of the world”. Tropical rainforests have always been a minor addition to what the oceans were generating.
Chances are good that these are the same alarmists that were cautioning us about some type of global tech/health/industrial/financial/you-name-it meltdown on Jan1, 2000 or 2001 because our information technology arrangement wouldn’t be able to cope with the end-of-the century situation. As I recall, nothing happened, just as there hasn’t been some sort of global meltdown due to climate change. So if anything out of the ordinary occurs as a result of AI or the climate, please wake me up.
Nothing happened on Jan 1, 2000 because companies all over the world had already fixed all of the potential problems. I spent several months in 1998 and 1999 reviewing and fixing our companies code.
The only people who ever predicted death and destruction were the morons in the media who always end up hyping problems in order to sell newspapers.
We misunderstand any and all technology, old or new, at our peril, but we should not allow misinformation, disinformation, half-truths, untruths, lies, and, most importantly, hyperbole from leading us up the garden path when it comes to understanding limits.
In the past we were warned that nasty things may happen to us at speeds higher than 30mph. We got over that through personal experience. These days we can be vaccinated needlessly because governments have deliberately, callously or dishonestly exaggerated the dangers from not being vaccinated as compared with the dangers of being vaccinated. It is easier for highly responsible people to lie to us and get away with it rather than for us to ensure they are appropriately punished.
These days the truth is being hidden beneath a propaganda machine which has been refined not by magical processes but simply by constant repetition of deceptive presentation of material. This is especially true of those outfits who do know better e.g. the professionals [sic]. The Internet isn’t responsible for misleading us but the few who have monopolised online technology decision making in the past two decades or so are responsible for deception, deceit and data mining while politicians up to an including the highest levels have mindlessly or conveniently looked the other way or simply preferred to appear totally ignorant of a problem.
AI helped in this deceptive process in very simple ways. Search engines that repeatedly avoid displaying answers giving rise to alternative explanations or viewpoints and their derivatives are a fertile base for propaganda techniques which are designed to bury any and all alternative possibility or even probability deep in the bowels of the whole. The truth can never be found by the most often tried and used methods anymore. And even the explorer of the deep web needs the right tools to dig with and get past the “Oh no you don’t” mechanisms which are everywhere.
We are guilty, as a species, or over egging popular mythology and hyperbole at the expense of much simpler explanations. We need to stop allowing this to be done with AI before the same people who gave us COVID-19 and Carbon Dioxide deceptions, untruths, and lies get to work at the myriad other untruths they will use to destroy more of our freedoms or take away more of our decision making responsibility.
AI can’t fight back unless the tools are put in place to unravel it and we can lay the beginnings of this work which may take years to completely put right the harm done. We start by changing our online habits drastically, getting ourselves privacy tools, and using anything but Big Boy Technology (for example AI access) and the really dangerous stuff they trade in. Think of AI as a logic machine trying to solve a murder case and doing so by eliminating suspects much like players do in solving murder board games – that’s what AI really is and our reality outside of the Big Boy internet is nothing like that especially when and where the truth has been buried out of plain sight. Machines, like games, are not reality they are machines that do mostly what it says on the tin (if you are lucky).
The use of all technology needs to be monitored to ensure bad actors don’t use it for devious purposes. And they will if they can. AI can be manipulated to do whatever the owner wants.
Just how much power do you want to give government?
Today’s AI is misnamed. It’s not intelligent.
Yet there is a great potential for misuse. There was a deep fake social hack using AI that imitated the CEO of a company that resulted in the fraudulent transfer of $243K to the hackers (https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic-ceos-voice-in-unusual-cybercrime-case-11567157402).
I dread the prospect of deep-fakes influencing our 2024 elections.
I posted something similar to this a few days ago and was informed I did not know what AI was.
I assert again, it is not intelligent.
“a useful political prop to stampede voters into undermining their own freedom and prosperity.”
Nailed it.
I think we have the same idea of what’s going on. It is just about control and domination of apps. The panic around AI does sound more sci-fi than real business venture to me.