Pirate's Cove

Thomas Friedman is utterly losing his mind, not really surprising over AI, with a side plate of TDS

A.I.: Let’s Not Have Another Failure of Imagination

“Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

That’s what President Trump said about the Covid-19 outbreak on Feb. 10, 2020, about a month before it forced our country and the world into a lengthy lockdown.

Tommy does understand that lockdowns were primarily driven by Democrats, including his own paper, right?

Why do I recall that today? Because when I think back on the biggest disaster stories I have covered — including 9/11 and Covid-19 — I am struck that they have one big thing in common: a failure of imagination. Sure, government experts prepared for these events in theory, but in practice how many of them imagined that suicidal terrorists would fly commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? And how many imagined that a respiratory virus that emerged in Wuhan, China, would kill millions of people and drag down the world economy for years? So today, when it comes to the possibility that artificial intelligence, which is falling into the hands of rogue actors and is beginning to manifest a will of its own, could become incredibly destabilizing, my imagination is fully engaged.

He’s seriously using an important phrase used by the 9/11 Commission to push AI doom conspiracy? And thinking millions will die like COVID? Well, hey, maybe if governments around the world had acted correctly, realizing that those in danger were the older and with conditions, rather than freaking everyone, that a lot of lives could have been saved and the economies wouldn’t have been in trouble and still having trouble. Do we really want government running all the AI companies when government failed so badly on COVID? And, to a degree, 9/11? That it was government which enabled the creation of COVID by giving money to China to do research.

Here is what my imagination is telling me. It is telling me that the big A.I. companies in America and China are not being candid with us about how little even they understand the power and reach of the models they have developed, like sorcerers, in their labs. It is telling me that the Trump administration, headed by a man who so often governs by social media post, is uniquely unsuited to the kind of comprehensive, sustained, coordinated governance that keeping A.I. safe demands. And it is telling me that there is so much at stake — economically, militarily and technologically — and so little trust between Washington and Beijing that it would take a miracle for the United States and China to agree on the kind of deep collaboration needed to defuse the most nightmarish threats posed by A.I.

Well, at least he gets the notion that government is untrustworthy and foolish with his side of TDS.

It is still not too late, though, for radical rethinking before something very bad happens that forces all the key players to do things they never imagined, things they will have to do in the middle of a full-blown A.I.-driven crisis. I’d rather be remembered as the boy who cried wolf when the wolf never came than as someone who got eaten by it.

So here goes: “Wolf, wolf, wolf, wolf.”

The same NY Times wouldn’t cover Biden’s declining mental health or Hunter’s laptop.

But I will breathe a sigh of relief only when I see Washington and Beijing put their heads together with their respective A.I. companies to draw up a long-term plan for how they can continue to compete on A.I. technologies, while simultaneously agreeing on internal A.I. guardrails to prevent increasingly capable A.I. systems from, on their own, creating catastrophic cybersecurity, biological, nuclear or financial risks. This a geopolitical, geoeconomic and technological challenge no generation of American and Chinese statesmen has ever before faced. They dodge it at their, and our, peril.

Yes, yes, he does go on a rant in wanting the same governments that failed for COVID and September 11th to be in charge of AI. With a decent side of TDS.

“We’ve unleashed Darwin in silicon,” Beinhocker explained. The latest A.I. models have demonstrated a capacity for “self-improvement, self-replication and self-preservation. When you put those three things together, and their evolution happens at silicon speed, not human speed, you’ve got something extremely powerful, potentially dangerous and impossible to control.”

This becomes even more true as we begin to give our A.I. systems bodies in the form of robots, drones and vehicles. We must ensure that there is always a human in the loop — that they are never fully autonomous — until we can guarantee these systems will always operate in line with human well-being, Beinhocker added.

Would these be the same humans who had a failure of imagination? Liberals are nuts.

Read: Good Grief: NY Times Compares Coming AI Doom To 9/11 »