Pirate's Cove

My favorite part about all this is who most news articles show zero journalistic skepticism

Uncontrolled AI could lead to ‘silicon species’ rivalling humans, warns Microsoft

The head of Microsoft AI has warned that without adequate safeguards, the development of AI could lead to the emergence of a new “silicon species” which competes with humans.

Mustafa Suleyman said rival firm Anthropic is treating AI like it is human, an approach he called “misguided” which could create technology that humanity cannot control.

Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, the chief executive said it was “right” for people to be concerned about AI, but there were “very practical things that we can do” to control it.

The comments are the latest in a series of stark warnings from the AI industry about the technology’s possible dangers. Anthropic has been approached for comment.

Speaking to the Today programme on Thursday, Suleyman warned against firms continuing to create AI systems capable of setting their own objectives, earning money and owning assets.

That would mean “essentially seeding a new silicon species”, he said, which could “no doubt compete with us for resources, no matter how much it cares about humanity and loves us”.

And those “very practical things” to avoid a new silicon species killing us all would be government rules and regulations which end up allowing all the big companies, like Microsoft, to continue operating while making it really, really hard for small companies and start ups, right?

Dame Wendy Hall, professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, described the comments as “the sort of conversation we need to be having internationally”, contrasting it with the “histrionics” from some AI companies which she said only served to “scare everyone”.

OK, someone is being skeptical, good. But, really, do we need to have conversations? AI is not really truly intelligent. It’s just really, really good software based on math and algorithms. It does not think for itself. It does not reason. Anything it learns is simply data derived from code. The code is fantastic, but, it’s not Skynet. Ava from Ex Machina. I, Robot, or Metropolis, or M3gan, or Companion. Or any number of movies where the computer code was thinking for itself, exceeding it’s programming, where it can truly learn across many subjects and truly understands. Today’s AI is not even freaking close. There’s no autonomy. Sure, it can fool people within a narrow subject. But, there’s no heart or soul. It’s like listening to all those stupid songs made with sounds recorded to a computer long ago and now put out there versus people actually playing instruments.

Anyhow, since Anthropic was mentioned, since they seem to be the leader in the doomy histrionics

Anthropic policy chief says AI companies can’t be expected to operate on ‘honor code’

Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy, said she doesn’t think artificial intelligence companies can manage oversight and safety concerns by following an “honor code.”

“We want to work with government to figure out what makes sense,” Heck said Wednesday at the Politico Decoded Summit in Washington. “We can’t be checking our own homework, and that’s very clear.”

Heck’s comments come days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei rocked the tech sector by calling on the industry to deliberately slow the pace of model development. Amodei proposed a three-step plan on Saturday to temper how quickly model capabilities improve without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”

So, the problem is not the AI, the problem is that the company is irresponsible, full of irresponsible leaders who are admitting they are irresponsible. Seriously, would the regulations look more like what government did with telecommunications (phones) early on, or like when deregulation happened and the explosion of phone use happened from the 80s (that’s a long explanation), leading to today’s cellphone system?

The real reason why Donald Trump is so furiously against AI guardrails

Washington’s biggest question this week: Why is President Donald Trump so furiously against an AI slowdown in the wake of apocalyptic warnings from some top industry executives?

The clue is in one word — “hoax” — that he’s using to ridicule fears that computerized agents could one day seek to destroy humanity.

When Trump reaches for the H-word, two things are usually happening: He’s facing a controversy threatening his political or personal priorities, and he’s lost control of the politics.

The very fact that CNN calls it “politics” shows there is no real concern. What would be fun is if Trump came out and said “I support big regulation on AI, let’s do it.” I bet most Liberal outlets would suddenly be like “Meh, this is no big deal”, like when the Washington Post initially referred to COVID-19 as a slightly bad cold.

Read: Microsoft: Uncontrolled AI Could Lead To Scary Silicon Species »

You know, maybe there is a chance AI kills us. But, really, I think people are suddenly starting to lose their shit because they have been exposed heavily to all the doom and gloom originating from a few people and amplified by the Credentialed Media and a few politicians

Poll: Americans say there’s a serious risk of AI destroying humanity

A majority of Americans think artificial intelligence could someday destroy humanity.

The stunning new finding from The POLITICO Poll underscores the depth of people’s anxieties about the rapidly developing technology — and how quickly public sentiment around AI has hardened. Just a few months ago, AI was a nebulous concept for many Americans. Now, lawmakers in both parties are racing to understand how to control its growth.

Overall, about two out of three Americans say there is at least a “moderate” risk that advanced AI could destroy humanity, with majorities across parties, genders and age groups holding that view. Americans who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 are somewhat more likely to see such a risk (70%) than those who voted for President Donald Trump (60%).

That’s actually pretty wild, something that causes both parties to have the same beliefs.

Those fears have burst into public view in recent days after the leaders of the nation’s top AI labs — Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman — called with Elon Musk for slowing the pace of advanced AI development. The rare show of agreement from some of the industry’s fiercest competitors pushed long-simmering warnings about the technology’s dangers into the center of public debate.

And Americans appear inclined to take those warnings seriously.

Yeah, well, again, I think those slow down calls from the companies are really just methods to get government to limit up and coming companies while the big boys already have all their power and money, because, really, they can all voluntarily slow down, right? If people were so worried about AI going all Terminator they would have freaked several years ago when AI really started hitting the market. So, why now?

Money. That’s it. Well, control by the big companies already in charge, but, that also leads to money.

The poll results signal a growing political problem for the president as he has pushed back on increasingly urgent calls to slow AI development and emphasized the need for the United States to maintain its competitive edge over China. In a series of Truth Social posts on Monday, Trump dismissed the AI alarms as a “HOAX.”

Some of Americans’ concerns over the existential threat of AI may stem from their broader unease with the technology. Across a range of scenarios tested in the survey, majorities of respondents said they would be uncomfortable with AI being used in their everyday lives.

Most of these same people are already using AI. It’s not true AI, it’s just a f*ckton better at responding than previous. I’d actually be interested to see these types of polls performed in other countries, to see if the freakout occurs there, too.

Real Clear Politics is loaded with articles this morning, such as (below the fold)

Read More »

Read: Good Grief: 63% Say AI Could Kill Us All »

They can call it regulation, but, that’s just another word for control

Here’s The Nation, a very far left outlet

When you spot a cockroach, it’s very rarely an indication that you’re dealing with a single solitary little creature who has just happened to have journeyed to your nice apartment on a field trip. It’s far more likely to signal that you’ve got an infestation.

The AI world has been having something of a cockroach summer, at least when it comes to unsettling reports of AI behavior. The first nasty beastie poked its way into the sunlight in late July, when OpenAI reported that some of its AI agents had escaped the company’s control during a testing run and hacked the website of a tech company called Hugging Face. After that, the cockroaches kept coming. (blah blah blah)

Coxon’s admission has triggered a fresh round of demands in Washington to bring AI under a regulatory regime less likely to kill us all—an awkward fit for a Republican congressional majority that previously sought to outlaw all state and local efforts to rein in the industry. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei worried in an online essay that an AI agent swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet” within a year, echoing widespread calls for a slowdown in AI development—though most of the solutions he proposed, like “embedded evaluators” in AI labs, would be voluntary ones, and he made only vague references to government regulation. Sources tell The Information that Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are talking about setting up an AI industry standards body.

Yet even without the threat of imminent AI takeover or outright apocalypse, there are ample reasons to dial back the runaway bid to cram AI into every sector of American life. Even those skeptical that so-called rogue AI agents are really only a few months away from taking over the world were able to suss out some of the less controversial implications of the attack. These observers noted that you don’t need AI agents to go rogue to cause a serious amount of damage: Malicious actors could direct a similar AI agent swarm to hack anything—from government websites to the Siemens PLCs that control our water filtration plants.

Government dictating it all sounds so benevolent, eh?

Niall Ferguson: AIpocalypse Now
It’s not just the next 9/11, enabled by AI, that is coming. It’s the next global financial crisis. It’s the next pandemic. It might even be the next world war. What, if anything, can we do about it?

Doom!

(Sean Davis) Understand what is happening with AI here and why it has more to do with amassing political power than it does computing power.

If you look back at the last 100 years in America, we have moved through 4 distinct eras of communication which each defined the types of politicians we elected.

The early 1900’s were still dominated by print, followed by radio, then broadcast television, followed by 24/7 cable news, and then the Internet and social media. (snip)

Dario and his AI buddies want to be the only ones in control. They hate open source, because that is a threat to their control. The solution? Cook up doomsday AI scenarios, demand regulation, and watch as the government enforces an AI cartel run entirely by Dario and his friends. That is exactly what we are witnessing right now. Except it’s not just about control of AI. It’s about using AI to control the world. That is what’s at stake right now.

Besides that all those big AI companies want to keep the smaller companies small, politicians want to control, because that’s what they do. Democrats love Government, and controlling AI gives them control of narratives. But, sadly, even good Republicans are falling for it

(HuffPost) Lawmakers are not exactly rushing to prevent tech companies from endangering humanity’s existence with rogue autonomous software, but recent warnings from industry insiders are prompting real debate, and potentially even action, sooner rather than later.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, has been working on a bill with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) on legislation to address the potentially “catastrophic risk” artificial intelligence poses. But at least one key Democrat fears the legislation won’t be strong enough, warning it could be used to block more meaningful action at the state level.

We definitely need to slow the roll on this.

Read: Politicians Are Increasingly Looking To Control AI »