~Basil

By David Haggith
The Daily Doom

April 12, 2023

As the title says, AI has already been put on the task of destroying all of humanity. While the video comes to a stop, there is NO indication the computer did. For the sake of new readers to The Daily Doom, I’ve also included a couple of recent headline links you may have missed that I published about a week ago as background that really makes this story important. You’ll find them below today’s main headline under the category “Off-the-Beat or Just Plain Offbeat News,” so you can check them out. If you have the time, read them first and carry their warnings into the experience as you watch the AI computer carry out its assigned task. (If you don’t have time for all of this, you may want to skip ahead to today’s news for now and then come back to this when you do.)

The dark background to today’s story

These prior stories were of moderate interest to me at the time, so I shared them, thinking they could amount to more. I had no idea how much more. One of those stories, published originally on March 30th, said that several major AI researchers, including large institutions, CEOs, social media sites, and billionaire developers, such as Elon Musk, had just written an open letter, asking for ALL artificial-intelligence research everywhere in the world to be paused immediately. The signatories of major reputation on the letter went so far as to state we would all die if that didn’t happen. (And this is just the background for today’s story.)

Well, I took that somewhat as hyperbole until the story that I am including today in The Daily Doom came out a few days ago. After all, Musk has been warning about this for a couple of years, so I just took it as another general warning about where AI would eventually go if we did not take a global pause in developing it now to set some internationally accepted guardrails because some nefarious actor would put it to work once some computer got smart enough to carry out some dark global command all across the internet. After all, this is the stuff science-fiction stories, of the kind Elon likely grew up on, have long forewarned us of.

When I was in high school, I watched a movie titled Colossus — The Forbin Project, which presented a futuristic story of a giant computer with artificial intelligence that exceeded human intelligence, which decided to destroy humanity. No one was able to pull its plug once it realized its human creators were a plague upon the earth because the building that housed it was highly protected under the computer’s own control.

Many science-fiction stories like that came out over the years, but I always figured “pulling the plug” was failsafe – a word you learn to never to trust when used in movies of this kind. It always means certain annihilation is coming. Even if a computer achieved true artificial intelligence greater than humans and even if it controlled the building it was in with remote-control machine guns, lasers, etc., we could always just shut down the power grid in its part of town or bomb the wicked thing and end the threat.

Not so. Not anymore. That is now likely impossible despite the ultra-concerted, global stop this open letter all but screamed out for. And these are people who have global business reputations to consider before they start howling like air-raid sirens about humanity’s imminent destruction from their own industry if AI experiments are not halted immediately. The situation has already gone beyond what a halt could probably accomplish even if they are immediately listened to by everyone doing such research, which seems highly unlikely.

One researcher in the story even says we need to permanently ban all experimentation in AI immediately. That seemed a bit alarmist to me when I published the story a little over a week ago, but only for the moment. I mean the rest of the big AI developers were still worrying out loud in phrases that sounded like this COULD become a global holocaust of all humanity if AI got smart enough. However, the guy advocating for a full long-term stop was published by Time Magazine. So, he wasn’t just any old conspiracy hack either.

The open letter from the most important people working in AI warned that “in recent months” — yes, that suddenly — AI researchers have been in an “out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

Those CEOs and institutions only wanted some shared safety protocols in place before the human race goes any further with AI development – you know failsafes. I don’t believe failsafes are ever failsafe; but, hey, at least this sounded a problem for humanity’s not too distant future. Nope. As it turns out in today’s story, it’s already being carried out by AI NOW!

“Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society,” they wrote. “We can do so here. Let’s enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall.”

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