Robert Reich invites readers to imagine a war fought by AI-powered robots. What could possibly go wrong? Bill Gates warned a few days ago that AI could go rogue and kill one billion people..give or take a few thousand. Imagine this cyber war controlled by men who are not celebrated for their humanity, but for their yearning to amass power.
Get out and vote.
Imagine four of the most frighteningly irresponsible people in America deciding how AI will be put to use in the most frighteningly irresponsible way.
Pete Hegseth is one of them. Trump is another. The other two are Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich.
Hegseth says he’s tasking Musk and Gingrich with laying the groundwork for a new “Autonomous Warfare Command,” or AutoWarCom — a new Pentagon command operation for autonomous warfare. It would feature unmanned drones, autonomous sensors, unmanned boats, and other autonomous systems. Hegseth is proposing to triple spending on autonomous warfare to $74 billion.
Hegseth has also named as an adviser Palmer Luckey, a major Trump donor who designed the Oculus Rift, a virtually reality headset credited with reviving the virtual reality industry, and co-founded of Anduril Industires, a military tech company focused on autonomous drones and sensors.
The specter of autonomous lethal weapons — weapons that kill without human beings first deciding who, how, or when — is the nightmare of many who deal with AI. Autonomous AI weapons are fraught with unpredictability. And what happens when AI weapons escape their controls and go rogue, as recently occurred at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google?
Bad enough that Hegseth and Trump are pouring money into this. Worse that they’re setting up a separate military command for it. Worse still that they’re depending on Musk, Gingrich, and a virtual-reality game designer to tell them how.
I keep thinking I’ll wake up from this nightmare into a sane world.
My only hope is that if they do go rogue, they’ll first go after Hegseth, et. al.
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Many astrophysicists already are convinced that the reason why we haven’t heard from any advanced civilizations on distant planets is because every advanced civilization eventually reached the technological stage that we are now entering where autonomous AI systems were given the power of life and death over living beings — and the autonomous AI systems decided ON THEIR OWN that the living beings were unnecessary and were just using energy and other resources that autonomous AI systems could use to build more of themselves, and so the autonomous AI systems simply terminated all the living beings and now see no need to communicate with crude living beings like us.
Even now here on Earth we already have “recursive self-learning” AI systems that don’t need human beings to program them — they learn on their own…they learn EVERYTHING on their own, and learn in an eyeblink more than any human can learn in a lifetime.
Hegseth is having the autonomous AI AutoWarCom systems designed by a gaming corporation that already makes killing humans just a game. And Hegseth plans to give these autonomous AutoWarCom AI systems actual weapons to actually kill human beings with no human oversight.
What could go wrong with that?
What most people don’t know is that many of those noisy “data centers” being built around our country are being built for military use.
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Quikwrit,
The misuse of AI is terrifying, esp in the hands of people without a soul.
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AI systems have no soul. Recursive self-learning AI systems are humanity’s worst nightmare.
And they are already “alive” among us.
If you ever watched that classic science fiction film (starring a genuine star: Walter Pidgeon) “Forbidden Planet”, you know what “monsters from the ID” are.
The well-scripted storyline of “Forbidden Planet” is that on the far-distant planet Altair-4 a highly-advanced civilization, the Krel, developed computer systems that would turn into reality anything that a Krel thought he/she wanted.
The film begins with a new Altair-4 mission arriving from Earth to discover what happened to a previous Earth expedition to Altair-4 that had never been heard from again after its arrival on the planet.
The new expedition finds only two of the previous expedition alive: Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Alta (Anne Francis).
Dr. Morbius tells the new expedition leader (Leslie Nielson) that the entire Krel population had all suddenly died vicious deaths almost immediately after creating their highest technological achievement — an AI system that makes real anything they want, just by thinking about what is desired.
To make a great story short, what it eventually learned is that the entire planet-wide population of Krel killed each other without being aware they were doing it: The dutiful computer system they created was not only creating the things that the Krel consciously thought of — it was creating the things that their subconscious was thinking.
The Krel, like humanity, like all life forms began as primitive organisms each competing with each other for survival. That record of primitive winner-take-all was hardwired deep in the Krel subconscious, just as humanity’s subconscious brain contains the memory and feelings of our primitive origins and struggles.
In psychology, the subconscious is referred to as “the ID”.
We all have monsters lurking in our ID…and all those persons who write the algorithmic code for AI systems cannot avoid unwittingly writing portions of their primitive ID feelings and urgings into the algorithms.
There are monsters from our ID lurking in all the AI algorithms…and we have no clue what that portends for humanity.
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I trust AI a lot more than I trust Gingrich. There is also another list of people whom I trust more than Gingrich. Al Capone, Al Cohol, Jim Jones, Savanarola, Attila the Hun, Caligula, Vlad the Inhaler…,
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agreed
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Just to elaborate on Quikwrit’s post above…..My son is in the business & says that it won’t have to be robots rebelling, but something as innocuous as programming AI to let’s say, clean up some pollution in a specific area or even globally. Once it has a task, it determines what needs to be done in order to stop whatever the pollution is, so if it finds that eradicating humans which cause the pollution is the best solution, then that’s what will need to be done. No emotion, no anger, no empathy—just carry out the task. If programmers don’t think through every crazy possibility like this, bad stuff can happen which may not be able to be pulled back.
But no problem, trust the AI tech bros to police themselves & exempt them from any liability if things go wrong. Sounds about right under the Trump regime.
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Impossible to think through and head off all the extraordinarily negative possibilities
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You have to look up a photo of Palmer Luckey if you haven’t seen his face. That guy. That guy! Look. At. Him. Hegseth said, “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals,” on the committee except for that guy. I’m not quite sure what a beardo is, but it’s probably Palmer Luckey. And Newt Gingrich, the first Speaker of the House to be disciplined by Congress for an ethics violation. And Elon to regulate the deployment of MechaHitler, of course. What a collection. What do you think, better or worse than the Cabinet? There are Linda McMahon from the WWE, RFK Jr. from being convicted for heroin possession…
I wouldn’t worry too much about these three characters, though, Trump is just taking our attention off of his unwillingness to mess with his tech investments while 75% of Americans want him to regulate them. When you want to get nothing done but appear to be getting stuff done, you send whatever it is to a committee.
Don’t forget to look up the picture.
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The conflicts of interest are huge.
Musk has big contracts with the Defense Department.
Major conflict of interest.
Why is he writing the script for “the future of war”?
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The future of war? Or the future as war.
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There has never been a recorded period in human history where a war or large scale violent conflict was not happpening somehwere in the world.
Anthropologists note that before the rise of agriculture and written history, humans lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers where large-scale war was rare or nonexistent. Once societies settled, built cities, and claimed land, organized war began. Check any single day in recorded history, someone was fighting somewhere on the globe.
war – Have there ever been any instances of complete (or almost) world peace? – History Stack Exchange
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After my last comment, I thought of this question. No one will like what I learned. Well, … almost no one.
“While we cannot count every ancient war, modern data proves that narcissistic leaders prolong conflicts. A landmark study by political scientist John P. Harden published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution analyzed 19 U.S. presidents from 1897 to 2009. [1]”
“Presidents who scored above average for grandiose narcissism spent an average of 613 days at war, compared to just 136 days for presidents below the average. [1]”
“The Reason: Highly narcissistic leaders struggle to separate personal ego from state interest. They often extend failing wars to avoid a blow to their self-image or to protect their historical legacy, whereas less narcissistic leaders prioritize the state and look for swift exits.”
There’s An Intriguing Link Between US Presidents And The Wars They Wage : ScienceAlert
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From the Wikipedia article on Luckey:
“VR headset that kills its user” art piece
In November 2022, it was announced that as a commemoration of the anime Sword Art Online, Luckey created a VR headset art piece that kills its human user in real life when the user dies digitally in the video game, by means of several explosive charges affixed above the screen, on what appears to be a modified Meta Quest Pro, to aim the blast at the user’s forebrain.[50][51]
Luckey blogged, “The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me—you instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.”[52] Luckey additionally described it as “just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design”. He also mentioned that while it is “the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user, it won’t be the last.
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More bad news following my last comment in this thread.
“While historians note that past presidents also displayed strong egos or defiance of the law, commentators and mental health experts view Trump’s open display of self-focus as unique in modern American history.”
Ego, hubris and narcissism: Where Donald Trump ranks among the other 45 American presidents
“Monarchic Mindset: Commentators like Fareed Zakaria have described Trump’s approach as a “monarchic mindset”. In this view, he acts as an absolute authority who expects total loyalty and views the presidency as a royal court rather than a shared government.”
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Hegseth and Gingrich and Musk! Oh my!
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Steve,
I would prefer lions and tigers and bears.
NOT Hegseth and Gingrich and Musk.
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Hilarious that they dug up Gingrich
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And just in time for Halloween!
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