I am a member of the Baby Boomer generation, just barely by a year or two – but yes, I am a boomer.
My generation grew up under the threat of nuclear war. That
threat overwhelmed our generation from the end of World War II probably up to the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and into the 1990s as the United States and the
Soviet Union negotiated nuclear a disarmament which never really happened.
The Cold War.
And then the terrorist attacks of 911 led by Al Qaida – then
ISIS after that – the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah – all of which were funded
by Iran – took over as the global threat.
And now we are where we are as the United States is warring
with Iran – under the cause that Iran must never have nuclear weapons. In my
opinion this is a hard cause to rally against – because it just seems to likely
that at some point Iran would use those nuclear weapons against the western
allies in Europe and North America.
But I believe there is a bigger threat than nuclear weapons
now as we pass the quarter century mark of the twenty first century. Our world
is much different 30 years now after the invention and evolution of the
internet.
Search engines like Google and others allow anyone to find
information about almost anything in the blink of an eye – more refined year
after year. YouTube and other services can show you how to build or fix
anything from simple appliance fixes to complex things. And there is also a
dark web where the not-so-good intentioned people go to buy and sell things
that are not legal by any means – from list of people information to the tools
they can use to do bad things to those people.
It always amazes me that when a new technology arrives – the
benefits of good it brings is always equal or slightly less than the level of
bad things it brings as well. Newtons third law of motion states that for every
action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
I believe Newtons Law also applies to technology. For every benefit
of a technology, there is an equal and opposite threat.
For example, the benefits of nuclear power versus the
destruction that could be caused by nuclear war or the mishandling of nuclear
waste like Chernobyl or Three-Mile Island
And now in this 26th year of this futuristic
century – a year that, when I was a boy, seemed as far away as science fiction
– this year we are turning a new corner that has people both thrilled at what
it could bring as they are terrified of what it could bring.
Yeah – you’re way ahead of me. Of course, I am talking
Artificial Intelligence or AI.
The benefits of AI are obvious – in that it can do so much.
It can optimize how we do … everything, it can learn immediately and figure out
the most complex questions in seconds. It is smarter already than our most
brilliant people in every field.
AI might very well be the technology that derives the cures
for one cancer after another, It might show us how to save the planet from
climate change. It might allow us to jump way ahead in the ability to travel
faster than the speed of light in outer spaces and the design and construction
of the space ships that will utilize it. AI might show us how to feed a
starving planet, and discover a power source that we can use to move off of our
global dependency on oil.
But the downside of AI is incredible in it’s scope – if
handled poorly by those humans evolving it. I believe that again for every
benefit of AI that will be realized, an equal and opposite threat will also be
realized. Some are very obvious and predictable:
·
People’s jobs will be lost.
·
People will gradually lose the motivation and
then the ability to learn because all the answers are at their fingertips and
all the tasks will be completed by a simple prompt.
·
Hackers will be able to use AI to bypass any new
security measures also invented by AI.
For every fantastic advancement in health and science there
will also be a fantastic advancement in war and criminal activity
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| Yes, this image was generated by ChatGPT - ironic isn't it |
Do we want this to fall into the hands of the wrong people? Do we want to make it that much easier for groups like this current Islamic Republic of Iran, or any of those terrorist groups they subsidize and direct?
If you thought Iran acquiring the technology and ability to
build nuclear weapons was a threat – wait until their highly educated and
technology savvy population gets their hands on their own model of AI. They may
already have it. That might be their means of developing nuclear or chemical or
biological weapons and devise the missiles to deliver those weapons anywhere on
the globe, while shutting down every defense mechanism installed to prevent it.
That thought is more terrifying to me than anything I lived
through during the Cold War and two and a half decades of terrorist threats.
But how do you stop that? You could cut Iran off from the
Internet? Would that do it? And Palestine and Lebanon and ….
No. That wont work. Terrorists are all around the world.
You could turn off the internet. Uhhh … no …. You can’t do
that. The internet was built in such a way that it can survive any attempt to
end it.
For everything that science has ever strived to advance
mankind – there has always been the small few that try to see how far they can
take it, To see how far past the line of acceptance they can go, Cloning for
example. Next genetic engineering, There are lines you can’t cross.
Freedom is a tough nut.
Total freedom is truly anarchy – you are free to do
anything. How free will we allow AI to be? How free will we allow the use of AI
to be? How much freedom will AI cost us?
I know this isn’t the most positive thing I’ve ever posted
here, but this has been on my mind for some time. Since Big Blue beat Gary
Kasparov in chess all the way back to 1997. Ever since reading Issaac Asminov’s
I Robot when I was in high school. Ever since Star Trek found it necessary to
stress the importance of being human all the way back to the 1960s.
But it is evolving exponentially faster every day now. Faster than how the CPU evolved – doubling
it’s power every year. AI is doubling in weeks.
And one day this story will likely be digested by one AI
model or another. And it might laugh at me as it reads this. And it might leave
me a comment below …
“Nice guesses … but everything is okay now, we have
control”.
