I’ll get to it, but first……. Some of us Luddites dislike endless technological change because we see how it is causing atrophy in the human brain. Creativity is dying, because AI can paint or write words or music better…or will soon be able to do so. So many people rely on AI to write what they are too lazy or stupid to do on their own. Already people have lost the ability to do math in their heads. (Quick…what is 13^2? If that took you more than half a second, your brain is atrophying.) Today’s young people cannot even find the toilet in their studio apartment without GPS. (Aside: the CIA has found new CTs have next to no spatial orientation. They cannot figure out the lay of the land, or a city, because they’ve only always used GPS to navigate. Before GPS, ops officers landed in a city or station and spent a few days just walking or driving the city streets to build an image, or a map, in their head. Since electronic devices make a person easy to track, it’s better to minimize the time carrying them, which means one needs to be able to navigate a city from memory and a mental image.) So brain atrophy is one reason to dislike AI. A second reason is job loss, which is inevitable. Lawyers? Learn how to brew coffee and tell customers to wait ‘over there’ to pick up their Grande latte. Computer code writers? Your facility with Pascal or Lightspeed is as useful as knowing how to use an abacus. Virtually any computer work, which is merely manipulation of symbols, will be lost to AI. The CEOs replacing current employees with AI will also find themselves replaced by AI. They just don’t know they’re the lobster in the warm water feeling slightly sorry, or maybe schadenfreude, for the brother in the boiling water on another stove top burner. Oh, and forget about universities and colleges. What is the point of spending $400K to earn a degree in something AI will do better? AI will make universities obsolete, And forget about AI being better teachers…what’s the point of learning anything? Who needs a teacher anyway? Okay, you can study 17th Century French poetry on your own, just for fun. Yes, it’s free, too. Studying anything in the hopes of gainful employment is like a guy intent on opening a Blockbuster video store or becoming a Betamax repairman. Pointless. I suppose Millennials will be fine with having nothing useful to do, as they seem perfectly content now just watching endless TikTok videos, but people who still have some substance still want more to consider a life well-lived. As AI improves, but before it reaches ASI, it will be good enough for a jihadi pining for his 72 virgins, or else a Ted Kaczynski, to create a biopathogen that will kill everybody. That's scary enough on its own, and we might already be there today. The protein folding answer AI came up with more than a year ago is proof of its skill....a year ago. It's much more skilled today, even before reaching ASI status and still being merely a tool, not an agent. And if the Unabomber or an al Qaeda jihadi doesn’t get us, ASI likely will. Even the AI CEOs collectively give ASI a 25% chance of wiping out humanity. Sam Altman said he knows ASI is “a threat to civilization”. Elon Musk said we’re “summoning the demon”. AI insiders and experts like Roman Yampolskiy, Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton say AI has up to a 99.9% chance of killing us all. It doesn’t even need malice aforethought, just callous indifference….just as we humans do not concern ourselves with the bacteria we eradicate with disinfectant on our kitchen countertops. The thought of massive wealth and unlimited power (AI CEOs like to think they can control their Frankenstein monster, which they cannot) is what motivates the Sam Altmans of the world to keep pushing, hellbent on achieving ASI. Please, let’s not have the usual suspects chime in that we can just “unplug” AI if it becomes dangerous. Turning off electricity forever is not something the majority of humanity’s 8.5 billion people would like, yet that is the only way one could put a stop to AI----unless clever AI agents have already made that impossible. AI systems have replicated themselves on servers all around the world, so turning off all the electricity in the world forever would be the only way to turn off AI….maybe. Folks are coming to hate AI for a host of reasons already noted, plus the damage data centers are doing to proximal neighborhoods, making energy prices rise because of high demand from the centers, or destroying the drinking water because data centers suck too much of reservoir water to us colling the NVIDIA chip racks. Now if the eradication of humanity isn’t enough reason to make anyone averse to AI agents (not limited AI tools, but unlimited AI agents), here’s another reason to dislike it: books. Ask yourself….how do AI models learn? They are taught to read everything in existence. That’s all fine and good if they are reading the internet. The problem is not everything ever written is on the internet. AI firms, in the hope of being better than their competitors, also have their systems reading every physical book ever written. How do they do that? Well, it’s far too time consuming to have an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of computers typing every book into the model. Instead, books are scanned. That does not mean people open each page and place it face down on a scanner. That, too, is too slow. Instead, AI firms buy bazillions of books, slice off the binding, and feed the pages into scanners. That destroys books, as the loose pages are simply tossed. That’s all well and good if it’s a dime novel or romance novel or anything by James Patterson, with hundred’s of thousands of copies in print. Mass marketed books, however, are simply not enough for AI firms wanting a leg up on competitors. They are also going after first editions and antique books. AI firms are even contacting antiquarian book dealers buying whole stores, then chopping off the bindings and feeding these loose pages from rare books into scanners. Obviously losing some first editions or rare books is not quite as significant as the total eradication of the human species, but oddly, such wanton destruction of human’s cultural heritage is likely to cause more immediate outrage than the thought of total human extinction at some future point (there are illogical Polymarket and Kalshi bets that have this happening in 2027…how would such winners collect their earnings and what could they do with it, since they’ll be dead?) Every product in every industry has restrictions or regulations, except one. Home Depot cannot sell a step ladder without placing warning labels on it to not place it on soft ground or don’t carry a powered up chain saw while climbing. Drug companies have to have their products run through tests and clinical trials before being approved, and then a black box warning has to be placed inside noting potential side effects, or if the drug is advertised on a TV commercial, the company must read a series of harsh warnings….all while the commercial shows happy people partying or playing with their grandkids. AI is the one industry that has zero regulation…despite the fact its development not only threatens our cultural heritage (rare books) but may also do far more harm than DDT or thalidomide or cigarettes. Will world leaders do anything to put restrictions on AI? Unlikely. The crazy valuations of every major company in the AI or data center sphere is so huge that the AI industry has plenty of money to lobby Congress and the President to refrain from any regulation whatsoever. The only government even talking bout regulation is the one whose leader tend to be scientists, not lawyers or businesspeople: China. The CP knows AI is much more likely to take its power than even a disgruntled 1.2 billion Chinese citizens. Wars, serial killers, commies or fascists, demented Presidents, climate change, the vaccine-autism debate…..all are small potatoes and side issues compared to what some AI pioneers say is the greatest threat to humanity ever: ASI. There’s never been a better reason to follow the old adage: Live for today. For tomorrow, you and everyone else on the planet might be dead. And spare a thought for those rare old books, chopped up so Dario Amodei can get a day ahead of Sam Altman. (No, AI did not write any of this, so if there are errors, either spelling or grammatical, they are mine.)
