AI Is Coming
Our politics, economy, and society aren’t ready.
My podcast with AI pro and futurist Dan Faggella is a fascinating look inside the AI technologies changing everything, and faster than almost anyone realizes.
I came away from this interview, more convinced than ever that not one element of our society — certainly not politics or government — is ready for this change, and I’m making it part of my mission to learn more to prepare for the AI hard takeoff.
YouTube:
I’m a research scientist and worked with several high-level researchers in AI-related technology (quantum computing), including two Nobel laureates in Physics. We raised concerns maybe, oh, 20 years ago, about what the future of AI might bring. Humans are ill-adapted for the onslaught of AI, and the genie’s out of the bottle. I’m reminded of the famous Einstein quote, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Same might be said for communicating with our fellow Earth travelers. For many millennia—the entire time the human species has roamed the planet—the only significant social interactions we had were person-to-person, right up until the invention of the telegraph in the mid-19th century. The only remedy is more one-on-one human contact and less online engagement (as I type this on my iPad…ugh), as difficult as that may be to get back to. Is it possible? I say let’s try.
After Hunter's laptop roiled the discourse, a couple major news outlets did a deep forensic dive on the hard drive image released by Rudy Giuliani. It turns out that while all the drug addict stuff was real, many of the emails weren't. Tony Bobulinski's infamous "ten percent for the Big Guy" email had no metadata linking its origin to the laptop. Many of us knew early on that this was typical of Russian disinfo -- take something real and seed it with BS so that the BS appears real by association.
So for the easy kind of AI threat in our elections -- faked video and audio -- the defense is to keep an eyeball on the metadata; it will tell you whether the origin was from a camera and microphone.
The world the larger AI threat is portending leads to precisely the kind of regime that you, Rick, as a conservative / classical liberal intellectual, grew up to dread and oppose: A technocratic, paternalistic, administrative state run by the "best and brightest" on behalf of the most vulnerable. And in this case, the "most vulnerable" won't be the poverty stricken, it will be everybody who isn't a plumber :(.
The heavy hand of government intervention. Embrace it, Rick. It is humanity's only hope.