Essay by Eric Worrall
Climate activism is so 2025.
The Hard-Line Activists Ramping Up for the War With AI
The resistance to artificial intelligence is growing over fears about human extinction—but one activist’s disappearance has the movement on edge
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The last time Hall saw him was at the spartan Oakland cottage that served as headquarters for their hard-line group, Stop AI. Kirchner, an electrical engineering technician by training, was angry, insistent that more had to be done.
“I’m done with this,” he said, according to Hall. “The ship may have sailed on nonviolence.”
Kirchner’s disappearance looms over what has become ground zero for a hardening resistance to the world’s hottest technology. The Bay Area’s AI boom is drawing young disillusioned men and women to join the fight against it. They are upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups.
Their cause is now riding a surge of anti-AI backlash. Many Americans are souring on the technology amid mass layoffs, data center sprawl, reports of chatbot-fueled attacks by unstable users and hacking tools that have panicked cybersecurity professionals. Seventy percent of U.S. adults believe AI will cost jobs, and 55% believe it will do more harm than good in their daily lives, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll.
But for activists on the front lines, the driving fear is often more dramatic: human extinction.
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Read more (paywalled): https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anti-ai-activists-disappearance-sam-kirchner-6872879f?mod=hp_lead_pos7
Doesn’t all this seem familiar? Fears of human extinction, radicalisation and talk of violence. Except this time instead of targeting Exxon, the radicals want to target OpenAI and Anthropic.
Regardless of how you feel about AI, there is no putting this genie back in the bottle. A few weeks ago I provided a start to finish demonstration of how artificial intelligence can boost software development productivity by 800%. Similar gains in other industries are in the pipeline. Any economy which rejects AI will be steamrollered by economies which embrace AI.
As for those extinction fears, future AI systems will pose a risk, much the same as bioscience poses a risk in today’s world. An out of control AI has the potential to do immense damage, just as an out of control bioscience laboratory could inflict a new pandemic on the world. But most bioscience laboratories are sensible with the kinds of experiments they do, only idiots perform gain of function experiments with dangerous pathogens, or say try to produce a version of the plague which is immune to modern antibiotics, or plant botulism toxin genes in stomach bacteria, or experiment with that horrible immune system suppressing hack the CSIRO discovered in the early 2000s. And when someone does do the unthinkable, that same bioscience which makes such idiocy possible provides effective treatments for the problem their irresponsible colleagues unleashed.
Artificial intelligence will be no different – if anyone does something stupid with AI, other people armed with AI tools will clean up the mess.
Current generation AIs are nowhere near the level of capability required to create any of the hypothetical disasters extremists and science fiction fans worry about.
And there will be plenty of lesser mishaps along the path to superhuman intelligence to teach AI users the value of guardrails. Just as bioscientists learned the hard way to implement rigorous handling protocols, so AI users are learning the hard way to be cautious with their use of AI. There have already been some serious reputational and financial embarrassments because companies didn’t put adequate guard rails in place with their AI implementations.
Car Dealership Disturbed When Its AI Is Caught Offering Chevys for $1 Each
“That’s a deal, and that’s a legally binding offer,” the AI said, with “no takesies backsies.”
By Frank Landymore
Updated Dec 21, 2023 9:48 AM ESTArt of the Deal
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The dealership, Chevy of Watsonville in California, used the chatbot to handle customers’ online inquiries, a purpose it was expressly tailored for.
Chris White, a software engineer and musician, was one such customer. He innocently intended to shop around for cars at Watsonville Chevy — until he noticed an amusing detail about the site’s chat window.
…White took screenshots of the gaff and they immediately went viral. Soon, tons of random people were joining in on the fun, like goading it into explaining the Communist Manifesto. In the most viral example , one user tricked the chatbot into accepting their offer of just $1.00 for a 2024 Chevy Tahoe.
Read more: https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-dealership-ai
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A few more such incidents will teach our society enough caution long before AI becomes even a remotely plausible threat to our existence. AI guardrails will be a mature science by the time truly powerful AI systems are available. And I suspect, there will be a comprehensive monitoring system to detect and pounce on anyone who tries to push their AI in a forbidden direction.
