AI will not "launch" in the next six months. What will happen in early November is the US congressional election, which will be won, lost, or stolen by a president who at his inauguration announced that the US would go back to expansionism, implicitly backing Russia against Ukraine and China against Taiwan. He explicitly backed Russia against Ukraine shortly thereafter in the UN, see the map of voting. He is now dumping US weapons in a desert (not to diminish the high crimes of assaulting public infrastructure, particularly desalination plants but even data centres) making them unavailable for allies like Ukraine, South Korea, and Japan.
Six months after November, the only remaining significant EU military power has an election too.There are other crises already well underway, notably sustainability (not only of climate) and inequality so extreme that governments have difficulty regulating corporations. Indeed if you like you could say superintelligence has been underway for the 10,000 years we've had writing, which is why we've had exponential-upon-exponential increase in humans for literally all of recorded history. Now we need to reinvent both physical and economic security in a context that can no longer look like a pyramid scheme, because of that sustainability crisis I mentioned. Many nations are facing employment and wage crises and of course we will need to expect and facilitate migration as well as mitigation resulting from these changes. We aren't doing this fast enough – there are a number of genocides underway right now too.
But "AI" is not a good name for our problems. We now can indeed now solve logistics problems at a scale we never could before, for every value of "we". We are already doing absolutely amazing things in terms of solar energy, medicine, water provision (including desalination), and battery storage. We need to get better at governance and grand scale macroeconomic innovation. There are plenty of – too many! – jobs. So many things we need to do for each other. But these are just simple facts: a) if you make a penny from each of even half the people on the internet you make a LOT of money, and b) if you provide healthcare to one disabled person that takes all your time and will never scale, so c) redistribution has to happen, but happen in a way that motivates labour and building communities. As I said, problems of governance.
I wrote this rant on LinkedIn 10 September because I was really very angry about two things:
- other smart people posting industry-facilitating nonsense there.
- finding out that the tech industry had bamboozled the UK into paying £100,000,000 / year for tech industry lobbyists in 'our' "AI Safety/Security Institute."
Thanks to Paul Harland for reminding me.
Here's Wikipedia documenting the UN vote mentioned above https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_ES-11/7
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| By Timetorockknowlege - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160538259 |
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