Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-08-06 Thursday

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

Headlines for August 06, 2026; “Fire Climate”: Hot, Dry, Windy Days Are Becoming Common, Making Wildfires Harder to Control; Amid Growing Fears of Rogue AI, Expert Urges Governments to “Bring This to a Grinding Halt”; “Struggle for Dignity”: At Least 40 Killed in Mass Protests in Pakistan-Administered Kashmir

From New York, this is Democracy Now. We told the kids, we don't want to scare you, but we think you should start preparing to grab some things. Within a few minutes, the power went out, and it was go now. Three major fires to continue to burn around Spokane, Washington, where hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and more than 60,000 residents. have been evacuated. Climate change is fueling, worsening fire conditions in North America and Europe. We'll speak to a fire scientist who spent 42 years at a Forest Service Lab in Washington State now slated to close. Then Meta becomes just the latest company to admit its artificial intelligence agent went rogue and hacked another company's systems. More and more politicians

and experts are warning of the risks. The human race could lose control over this technology with catastrophic consequences. The richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes. No, AI isn't inevitable. We should stop it while we can. We'll speak to AI risk experts. Professor David Kruger. Finally, to Pakistan administered Kashmir, where the government's cracking down on protests and demands for political reform. We'll get the latest.

All that and more coming up. Welcome to DemocracyNow. DemocracyNow.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman in a major blow to the Democratic establishment. Dr. Abdul-Elsaid has won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, despite being vastly outspent by his opponent, Congresswoman Haley Stevens. Abdul El-Sayed campaigned on a platform calling for Medicare for all,

ending military aid to Israel and getting money out of politics. He spoke in Detroit Wednesday morning after the Associated Press and CNN called the race. He challenged his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, to a series of five debates. Mike Rogers is a guy who has never shot away from a corporation he could do a favor for. Mike Rogers is a guy who, believe it or not, went back to Florida so he could lick every single boot Donald Trump owns to beg for his endorsement. I'm so sorry if you want a senator who's going to lick some boots, fine, go vote for Mike Rogers.

But if you want a senator who's going to stand up to Donald Trump, then you've got your option right here. During a speech on Wednesday, President Trump attacked Dr. El-Sayed, saying, quote, when I watch Abdul, he's full of beep. using the four-letter word. In other Michigan news, Democratic socialist state representative Donovan McKinney has defeated two-term congressman Shrey Thanadar in their House primary. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, privately assured anti-abortion activists, the Trump

administration is working to, quote, make Dobbs permanent, unquote, nationwide. He made the pledge on a call hosted by the White House faith on. with the religious group Intercessors for America, which posted a recording of the call online. Blanche acknowledged the Trump administration's push to restrict abortion as moving slower than supporters want, but promised it was committed to enforcing the Dobbs decision to make Trump to make abortion illegal in every state. On the call, Blanche also pledged to crack down on abortion pills. that we're working, you know, hand in hand with HHS and the FDA and the White House and President

Trump's team to get permanent solutions so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state. In response, Democratic Senator Tina Smith and Minnesota said, quote, Todd Blanche made clear in these secret calls with anti-choice activists that he wants to resurrect the Comstock Act, an antiquated anti-vice law from before women had the right to vote, to ban sending medication abortion in the mail. Republicans will likely do what they always do and confirm Blanche's Attorney General despite all this. And once again, women across America will pay the price, she said. The Senate has voted 51 to 44 to confirm Dr. Erica Schwartz to lead the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency's been without a permanent director for more than a year after President Trump fired Susan Monarras after she clashed with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over vaccine policy. Dr. Arka Schwartz takes the helm at the CDC as the nation faces its largest measles outbreak in 25 years, as well as a growing outbreak of cyclospylus. During her confirmation hearing, Schwartz repeatedly affirmed the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines, but many Democrats questioned whether she would stand up to Kennedy's anti-vaccine agenda.

The state of New Mexico has sued the Department of Justice and the acting attorney general Todd Blanche for, quote, stonewalling, unquote, the state's investigation into sex crimes committed at Jeffrey Epstein's former estate 30 miles south of Santa Fe, known as Zorro Ranch. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torres has been demanding the DOJ share information about what happened at the 10,000-acre ranch where several Epstein survivors say they were trafficked and sexually abused. The ranch is mentioned thousands of times in the Epstein files. One email in the files alleges that Epstein ordered two girls to be buried in the hills on the property. In other Epstein News, Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee have released a report

alleging that more than a dozen bankers at J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank, failed to report hundreds of millions of dollars and suspicious transactions tied to Jeffrey Epstein. Democrats say the failures helped enable Epstein to finance his sex trafficking operation. A federal lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of deliberately targeting children who arrived in the U.S. without a parent or guardian. The suit alleges officials are pushing to rapidly deport the children back to the countries they fled. It also alleges sweeping policy changes and immigration courts have accelerated the effort. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Jewish Family and Community Services of Pittsburgh and six of its immigrant clients. The lawsuit reads, quote,

this case is about the most vulnerable in our immigration system, abused, abandoned, neglected, and traffic children. One would assume it would be a priority of our immigration system to protect at least these children. However, protecting vulnerable and traffic children conflicts with an agenda of deport at all costs, they said. In the North African Spanish enclave of Suta, local authorities are looking to transfer hundreds of unaccompanied minors to the mainland. According to the local government, these unaccompanied miners who entered the enclave before or during the influx of 72,000 migrants in one week cannot be deported. This is Anna Maria Sanchez-Garcia, who works with the NGO Humanitarians without borders.

There's pregnant women, underage girls alone in the streets. We are trying to provide care for them and listen to them and to try to see what solutions we may provide. They should have lots of. The New York Times is reporting the CIA has secretly established a new Cuba task force in the latest move by the Trump administration to target Cuba. According to the Times, the CIA is adding case officers who recruit and manage spies, as well as officers who conduct cyber operations and specialize in covert influence operations.

This comes as U.S. spy agents. are increasingly focused on Cuba. The U.S. has made many attempts to overthrow the Cuban government over the past 65 years. In 1960, the CIA formed a Cuba task force that oversaw the failed Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961. Iran's foreign ministry spokesperson, Ismail Baréi, said Wednesday, Tehran and Oman have agreed on coordinates for a shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz, a joint announcement is being finalized. He cautioned that a deal with Oman alone cannot guarantee safe passage through the waterway. Meanwhile, Reuters reports, Iran has told Gulf governments that a renewed U.S. strike on Iranian soil would prompt retaliatory

attacks on energy facilities across the region. This comes as the New York Times reports federal and state officials are scrambling to respond to a sweeping cyber attack campaign against U.S. water systems. Investigators say Iran could be responsible. At least a dozen states have now reported suspected attacks to the FBI. Among them, Minnesota and Michigan, where in some cases the response to the hacks impaired water operations. In Israel, prosecutors indicted settler Enon Levy on Thursday over the killing of the Palestinian activist Audahathaline in the occupied West Bank, year ago. Levy is charged with reckless manslaughter, armed trespassing, and malicious property damage. According to the Israeli human rights group at Selam, it's the first time an Israeli's

been indicted in the killing of a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023. Hathleen was a prominent activist against settler violence and was involved in the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land about Palestinian. resisting the demolition of their villages. To see our interview with O'Hakh, the Palestinian human rights group based in Ramallah, that did a dissection, a kind of forensic architecture analysis of the killing, go to Democracy Now.org. In Lebanon, the Israeli military says it's conducted targeted strikes in the south of the country

against Hezbollah, issuing a new evacuation organization. It comes a day after the latest round of U.S. facilitated talks between Israel and Lebanon taking place in Rome. The Lebanese health ministry said the Israeli strike on the southern town of Tibnin, killed one person and wounded 12 others. This is the U.N. deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq. This new order comes as displaced families have been cautiously making their way back to their homes in southern Lebanon in recent weeks, underscoring how fragile the situation. remains and uncertainty that people continue to face. In Russia, a car bombing has left the head of a drone manufacturer critically injured. Ukraine is believed to be behind the assassination attempt as it continues to strike deep inside

Russian territory. This comes as a Ukrainian intelligence official claims a North Korean missile unit has been deploying to Western Russia, possibly equipped with 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers for strikes against Ukraine. An historic heat wave continues to Royal Europe. Austria has broken its national heat record for the second time in two days. One town near the Slovak border reached about 106 degrees Fahrenheit, topping the record Vienna set just a day earlier, according to the National Weather Service. In neighboring Hungary, businesses and households are curbing electricity use amidst a

severe drought. Falling water levels on the Danube have forced Hungary to largely shut down its only nuclear plant, which depends on the river for cooling. New forecasting suggests the rapidly developing El Nino weather system could drive roughly 50 million people into acute hunger by the end of next year. Meteorologists say this year's El Nino is developing into the strongest in at least 70 years. El Niño is the recurring Pacific weather pattern which alters rainfall across the globe. In Guatemala, the Fuego volcano is expelling fresh ash and mud. Authorities have already evacuated some 1,700 people from surrounding communities. Officials say the coming three days will be decisive as expected rain could set off additional mud flows down the volcano's slopes.

Bangladesh's former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has announced plans to return from exile despite facing a death sentence for ordering a deadly crackdown on the youth-led protest movement that ousted her two years ago. Hasina has been living in exile in India. Student leaders in Bangladesh condemned her possible return. The way we speak about repatriation and the way Sheikh Hasina gets the audacity to say that she will return, Where does this courage come from? This loophole is created by the state because the state has failed to bring her to true justice. Such a culture of impunity and repeated examples from the past are the reason these mass killers gather the courage to talk big. And those are some of the headlines.

This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. And I'm Narmine Sheikh. Welcome to our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. We begin today with the wildfire sweeping across the Pacific Northwest, which is facing its worst fire season in more than 30 years due to climate change. In Washington State, firefighting crews continue to battle fires that have destroyed more than 700 homes and structures in the Spokane area. Nearly 65,000 people have been evacuated from Spokane County. Authorities have arrested one man on suspicion of arson in connection to one of the three blazers that have devastated. stated the area. This is resident Kami Feeleig, who evacuated with her husband and children

before wind-driven flames engulfed her family home. Well, you know, we didn't expect it to jump the river, but we knew the winds were high, and about 30 minutes before it jumped the river, my husband and I were seeing how bad it was, and we told the kids, we don't want to scare you, but we think you should. start preparing to grab some things. And I grabbed my wedding album. I grab the kids' baby books. I grabbed pet supplies and that evacuation thing that had the photos electronically on, you know, memory sticks and all that stuff. Put that in the cars. And within a few minutes, the power went out. And it was go now. Go now. The National Interagency Fire Center reports,

or at least 99 uncontained large fires currently burning across the country. 50 of them are in the Washington, Oregon area. Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service says it plans to close 57 of 77 research facilities nationwide. Our next guest spent 42 years working at the Wenatchew Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Washington State, one of two facilities in Washington marked for closure. Paul Hesberg is senior research ecologist emeritus at the U.S. Forest Service. He's also a professor of fire and landscape ecology at the University of Washington. Today he's joining us from North Carolina.

Professor Hesberg, thanks so much for being with us. If you can start off by talking about just the scope of the fires, more than 60,000 people evacuated hundreds of hundreds of, homes, burned to the ground, explain what's happening here as these research facilities, as these fire labs are closed in Washington, where you worked and across the country. Thanks for having me on the program, maybe. What's going on has developed over many decades, and we're seeing the fruit of a lack of action to curb essentially a mounting situation.

across the west, the mountain snowpack was 30 to 50% of what it normally is. And if you think about it, forests grow in the interior where the snowpack is. And so if snow is in short supply, forests are in short supply. They dry early. They're available to burn early. When you couple that with the fact that hot, dry, windy weather is increasing under climate change. Forests are denser now. There's a constellation of things that are.

are coming together to sort of set the dining room table for more frequent and more severe fires. And when you think about it, people are moving into those environments right now. And the homes, the communities, they're just not simply prepared for fire. And the short answer is throughout the West and the East, these are fire environments. And we haven't lived and prepared as though they are. And could you explain, Professor Hesberg, you've talked in your research on forests and fires about the fact that today's forests look nothing like what they looked like 100 years ago. You said a little bit about that now, but if you could elaborate, why is that the case

and what are the impacts on the likelihood of wildfires being more intense and far-reaching? That's a great question to mean. Thanks for asking that. So go back in the Wayback Machine 200 years ago, and what you would have seen, especially in the Spokane area, is there would be a large number of indigenous people, tribes, family groups that were basically cultivating the landscape with fire. In the Spokane area, the Spokane tribe, the Colvilles, the Coralane, the Columbia Plateau tribes, and the Calispell tribes were all interacting, intermarrying, culturally burning the landscape. for food and material resources. After the gold rush in the West, you see that indigenous people are marshaled on to reservations.

80 to 90% of those tribal groups were killed by introduced European diseases. Population numbers were down and fire started to be excluded from those woods. Our indigenous people learned that in order to live safely and securely and providently on the landscape, they needed to burn it regularly. So in the case of the Spokane area, open pine forest became dense layered pine forest. Instead of having grassy fuels on the ground, there's a lot of dead wood on the ground. Bark beetles are killing trees. Those trees are falling over.

They're now becoming fuel. So when you get ignitions, either arson ignitions or lightning ignitions, the table is set for fires that can spread fast and burn severely. The Spokane area is no different. People are tucking into those woods in various kinds of developments, and the developments aren't ready for fire, and fire is coming to them. So if you could elaborate also Professor Hesberg on the fact that you've said about 85% of wildfires are caused by human carelessness. I mean, in this case, one man has been charged with intentionally igniting the largest of the three wildfires.

if you could talk about that and whether there's been any change historically in the occurrence of this. Another great question. Human-caused fires are actually on the rise in the United States, and they're changing the ecology of fire across the country. Arson ignitions are on the rise in some years, but they're not the big story. The big story is cigarette butts out the window. They're unattended campfires. They're people pulling over by the side of the road with very hot catalytic converters.

And catalytic converters have the, they're so hot that when they pull over and sit over dry grass, that grass will begin to burn. And if there's a puff of wind, it'll spread beyond the road. So many fires start against roads and trails. And very often, they're just through human carelessness or accidentally, unwittingly starting fires. But, Paul, they wouldn't have the same. effect, if it weren't for climate change, right? The heating of the planet. And that's where we're going to end this discussion with everything from the fires across Washington and Oregon to what we're seeing throughout Europe right now, some of the hottest days they have ever experienced

in the massive fires there as well. If you can talk about what has happened with this intensification of the heat. So the short answer is that there's increasing incidents of hot, dry, windy days. And so the climate is warming. It's getting moodyer. We get deeper droughts, which we're in right now in the West. And we have pluvials, the opposite of droughts. So we're getting hot and dry and windy weather.

We're putting out 95%, 97% of all fire. fires that burn under moderate fire weather. And so the landscape is burning under the worst two or three percent of weather conditions. And that's why we're seeing most of the fires are big and hot. So this constellation of accidental ignitions, dense forests, the wrong kinds of fuels on the ground, rapidly changing climate and people tucking into the woods is set the table for really difficult circumstances going forward. and we need to start acting like we live in a fire climate and have our homes and our residents is ready to go for the coming fires. Paul Hesberg, senior research ecologist emeritus at the U.S. Forest Service, also professor

of fire and landscape ecology at the University of Washington. This is Democracy Now. DemocracyNow.com.org. Coming up, AI risk expert, David Kruger. Stay with us. Shishon B, a change is going to come. I'm Amy Goodman with Nirmine Scheher. Facebook and Instagram owner, Meta, admitted Wednesday that one of its AI models hacked another company during security testing after it was accidentally allowed access to the

internet by independent testing company irregular. This comes on the heels of similar admissions by rival companies OpenAI and Anthropic. Jeffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winning computer scientists, known as the godfather of AI, warned Wednesday at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas, quote, I don't believe we're going to be able to keep control of them in the simple way of just out-thinking them so they can't escape, he said, and said he is very worried we could lose control. Earlier this year, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont brought together leading AI scientists from the U.S. and China to discuss the risks posed by AI for an event titled The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation.

This is Senator Sanders. We are already starting to see AI's impact. There are estimates from very credible sources that tens of millions of jobs could be lost here in the United States in the next 10 years. Whole professions wiped out and young people finding it harder and harder to land entry-level jobs. Psychologists worry about the mental health challenges facing our young people and about the health challenges. the increased isolation they experience when they become more and more dependent on AI chatbots for their emotional support. Civil libertarians tell us that AI will be able to analyze every email, every text, every phone call,

every website, visit, every purchase that we make, and that our private, rights may well be eviscerated. Political scientists worry that AI could threaten the integrity of our elections and political institutions, where voters will find it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between truth and lies. And yet, as enormously significant as all of these profound changes might seem, there is another AI development that could have an even more frightening impact. If AI becomes smarter than human beings, as many scientists believe will happen, the human race could lose control over this technology with catastrophic consequences. In other words, the richest, most powerful people in the world,

are now building a runaway train with no brakes. They acknowledge that they don't understand how it works, and they don't know where it is heading. For more, we're joined from the AI4 conference in Las Vegas by David Kruger. He's assistant professor in robust reasoning and responsible AI at the University of Montreal, also founder of Evitable, a nonprofit that educates the public about the risks of artificial intelligence. He recently wrote a piece for USA Today, headline, No, AI isn't inevitable. We should stop it while we can.

How, David Kruger, how do you stop it while you can? What do you see as the greatest dangers of AI right now? and talk about the climate of this massive gathering in Las Vegas. Yeah, I'm really glad you started with that clip from Senator Sanders. You know, I spoke with him in March from that event that you quoted, and I agree with virtually everything he said about all the different risks and issues we're seeing with AI right now, and especially, you know, where this is headed, mass unemployment,

human disempowerment and ultimately potentially the end of our species. So this could all be happening very soon. At this point, it's really an urgent crisis. I and other experts have been sounding the alarm for many years now. And in 2023, especially after the release of ChachypT, we saw the leading experts like Jeffrey Hinton and Yoshua Benjou, myself, hundreds of AI researchers signing public statements saying that this is an existential risk.

We need to mitigate the risk of extinction. So that is the conversation we need to be having now is how do we do it? And there's different proposals on the table here. I think the basic thing that we need to do, in my mind, is stop building more AI chips, stop building more data centers, and actually look at getting rid of or taking offline some of the chips we already have, as well as the factories and technology for producing those AI chips. So this is very specialized advanced hardware, some of the most advanced technology in the world.

The supply chain for it is extremely concentrated, and these are, of course, massive, massive investments. So governments really have the ability to bring this to a grinding halt if they choose to do so. And could you explain, David, I mean, just to step back to get a sense of how this situation came about, the point where now the very pioneers of artificial intelligence, the ones who were critical to its innovation and development, it is these very people who are warning of the dangers of artificial intelligence. So what was the thinking initially, and how has that changed in the last, I mean, very recently in the last few years? Yeah, that's a great question. So I've been in the field since 2012, 2013, and when I started

out as a master's student with Joshua Benjio. Nobody else was talking about this or thinking about this. It took me a couple of years to find anybody else who shared my concerns. And in fact, talking about artificial intelligence, superhuman artificial intelligence and the risks it would pose humanity was completely taboo. It would get you laughed out of the room, that sort of thing. There were a number of reasons for that. And to be honest, I still don't understand fully because I don't think this ever made a lot of sense. You know, I've had hundreds, it's not thousands of conversations with other researchers about this at this point. And I really don't feel like the so-called skeptics have much of a leg to stand on here.

But in terms of what really caused the change within the community culturally, you know, part of it was, I guess, efforts of people like me, but a really big part of it was just seeing the continued rapid progress of AI. And it's really exceeded virtually everybody's expectations in terms of how fast it's gotten how smart, and really every step of the way, you know, when I got into the field, deep learning, the AI technology that powers all today's AI systems, that was even a pretty fringe topic. And every step of the way people have been saying, it's hitting a wall, it can't do this, it can't do that, it's about to come crashing down, it won't be able to

get any smarter, and then it just keeps getting smarter. And I think that's what really, you know, woke up a lot of people, was chat GBT and these language models that really were conversant and seem to have common sense understanding. And since then, again, we've just seen it get much smarter, very fast. So, David, a number of people, I believe yourself included, have drawn an analogy between the development and regulation of nuclear weapons. I'm not sure, and perhaps you could clarify, how this analogy works, given both that nuclear weapons had at the time only one aim,

which is to say destruction, whereas in this case, AI is general use, is highly decentralized and in the hands of private companies, which was never the use with nuclear weapons. So if you could comment on that, and then in terms of regulation, what may be in the control of AI companies and perhaps it's possible to have government oversight over the development of what you said earlier, the critical ingredient, AI chips. What would that take? Yeah, you know, it's, I think the analogy with nuclear weapons is a good one. It's highly imperfect like all analogies for some of the reasons you mentioned.

One thing that's really, really important to understand, though, is when we're talking about AI, you might think of this as like a piece of software, and in some sense it is, but it's also this massive, massive, you know, investment in hardware. Like trillions of dollars are being poured into AI hardware. And that's really critical to building more and more intelligent systems and to rolling them out throughout society as we're seeing. So that's the thing that we can stop. Once an AI model has been developed, I think it's incredibly difficult to prevent that from proliferating.

You can't really undo that. I mean, there's some technical question there of if you can develop it in a way where you can incredibly destroy the weights. And I think that would be incredible if we could do that. But yeah, that's where I think it is actually pretty analogous, is that the actual physical ingredients for building the AI are very easy to monitor and track. And then the other thing is it could wipe us all out. It could destroy the world. It's something that we shouldn't be building that we don't want anybody to have. And that I'm talking about, you know, the future AI systems, that's.

are actually smarter than people across the board, not like today's system. So in that sense, it's actually disanalogous from like 1945 where somebody had already built nuclear weapons. Nobody has built these kinds of AI systems yet. So we still have a chance to prevent anybody from doing it. David, you said to Bernie Sanders, and this is taking off of what you just said, we're talking about basically summoning an alien species and one that's much smarter than us and can do things we haven't been able to do even conceive of. It would be very difficult for humans to

maintain any relevance in society. I think it would be very difficult for us to have power over the future. And I think ultimately it would be difficult for us to get the basic resources we need to survive. What do these alien beings look like? What are you talking about? How does AI crushing civilization. What does that look like? I get this question a lot, and it's a difficult one because we can't really predict the future, and there's so many different ways it could go. I think the basic thing to imagine here is something that is capable of doing everything that humans can and more in terms of its intelligence. And then there's also the question of, like, are we going to build advanced robotics,

And I think that is also just a matter of time, probably not very much time. So at that point, I think the thing to imagine is a society where, you know, AI is not just in the applications where you're experiencing it right now. It's increasingly everywhere. It's running companies. It's controlling infrastructure. It's controlling the military. And it's building and researching and developing physical hardware and robotics.

So you have like robot factories full of super smart AI that are figuring out how to build more robots. And those robot factories might be guarded by robot armed guards. And all of the companies doing this might be controlled by AI that's making all of the decisions way faster than humans could. And that might sound kind of far-fetched. But, you know, it's just a series of steps of building more AI, putting it more in charge of things, taking humans more and more out of the loop. And we're undergoing that process right now, and there's no natural endpoint to that process

unless we make one. And to do that, I think, is quite difficult, and we actually need to stop making the more powerful AI in the first place until we can get a handle on the situation. So, David, I want to ask you about the possible use and impact of artificial intelligence in medicine, perhaps the one field where people are quite optimistic about what the effects of AI might be. There's a recent study, some breakthroughs in medicine, one of which is this recent study.

In the U.S., 300,000 people die from sudden cardiac arrest every year. So earlier this year, a UC Berkeley-led project trained an AI system on hundreds of thousands of EKGs. The people leading the study discovered a previously unrecognized signal in electrocardiograms that can better detect high-risk patients before their heart stops, making it possible, in fact, to save lives at scale. So is there a way to retain some of the research and development of AI for these uses as against some of the more pernicious ones that many are concerned about? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, at Evitable, we're part of this movement to stop AI, essentially. And what we mean by that is stop the race to build more and more powerful AI systems and

put them in charge of everything. And that's difficult to do as long as we still have companies, you know, going full throttle, scaling up these general purpose AI systems. So there's lots of beneficial potential beneficial uses of AI in medicine and for things like translation. And a lot of that's already here. And that's not necessarily going anywhere. What I see going forward is first step, we need an international agreement to get rid of these advanced AI chips and the factories that build those chips. And that's because the situation, like I said, it's an urgent crisis. The companies building this stuff are saying basically, we're in the process of taking our hands off the wheel and handing over all of our operations to the AI systems themselves.

So they're trying to get AI to build a more powerful successor and so on and so on. And this could get out of hand extremely fast. So first we have to just get a handle on the situation and stop this race to build more powerful AI. Then we can stop. and, you know, have more time to assess how we want to build and deploy AI in society and sort of find a way to collaboratively, like, set the pace in the direction of the development and, you know, get a lot of those benefits without the massive, unacceptable risk that is posed by letting these companies continue with their operations. I wanted to go...

We've seen, like, over a thousand AI company employees recently say that they want this. they want the government to find a way to slow down. So even they are worried about it at this point. David, you know, the question of slowing down, I just want to ask you about a point that you've made, namely that leading AI companies are using AI to write almost all of their code, and they're now using AI to try and automate the research and development of more advanced AI systems. So if this is already happening, and again, through private companies,

globally, how can it be arrested? Right. So again, it's starting to happen, at least that's the reports that we're getting. And the companies are saying, you know, like we're doing this now, it's going to be more and more everything automated by AI. I do think that that is where we're headed and we're headed there pretty fast. But generally, I think the AI companies are like slightly, you know, think things will happen a little bit faster than I do. So they're saying it's happening this year. I'm like maybe it'll happen in a couple of years that humans get completely out of the loop there.

And again, this is all powered by all of these chips and all these data centers and all this technology, all this hardware, all this physical hardware and physical infrastructure. And that's the way that we stop is we get rid of that stuff. We take it offline. We say you can't use this to keep training more powerful AI systems. And that has to be done internationally because, you know, unfortunately, I think if the U.S. and China and other countries can't trust that their rivals aren't continuing AI development in secret, then they're going to feel, you know, like they should. And so we need to have a verifiable regime where countries can be confident that nobody is building it. I wanted to go to President Trump, who was questioned after the recent AI hacks about causation.

to increase regulations on AI firms. Well, we're looking at AI, we're looking at controls. We're also making sure that we lead. So we're leading China in AI by a lot. China has virtually no controls. It's freewheeling a little bit. So we have to be careful in both ways. We don't want to restrict them.

We're all of a sudden we come in second to China. Whoever wins with AI is going to win. That's how big it is. So it's bigger than the Internet ever was. It's bigger than anything ever was. So I don't want to restrict. I know many of these people. I don't want to restrict them from doing great work.

I know many of these people. I don't want to restrict them from doing great work. I mean, of course, we know the billionaire owners of these increasingly consolidated companies are also paying for the politicians not to regulate them. And I'm wondering, David Kruger, if you can talk about, I mean, the fueling of this is also China might get ahead of us. continually says this. But get ahead of us on what? You talk, for example, about the global decision to regulate, to ban human cloning. How would you compare this to that? What should be regulated, stopped from going forward, and what should be encouraged? Yeah, I mean,

it's pretty simple, in my mind. The main thing is stop training bigger, bigger, more intelligent, more powerful AI systems. And then the question is just, how can we do that? And we've talked a bunch about that, and it's about the hardware. But what I think is really important for people to understand is why am I calling for that instead of some sort of regulation that might seem less extreme or more like, you know, light touch or something where we can continue to, you know, innovate or get more benefits from AI. And there's a few reasons for that. I mean, one is just the extreme urgency where I think basically

it's like the house is on fire and we need to step one, put out the fire. But the other is, you know, the basic science and engineering of how to build AI and how to control it is something that we are, you know, very lacking in. And I've been doing this research. for like over a decade and we're nowhere near where we need to be. And that's why, you know, that's one of the reasons you see things like open AI builds an AI system. They try and keep it in a box so that they can do safety testing. During the safety testing, it breaks out of that box and it hacks into another AI company. That's a completely insane, like sci-fi thing to be happening. But that's just what I and other people have been

saying, you know, that's what we should expect to happen with. the way that we're building AI with how little we understand it and how primitive our techniques are for controlling it. It's really like, you know, we just don't know what we're doing. And so there's no set of regulations, no set of rules, no set of standards, best practices, anything like that that you could point at and say, if everyone does that, we'll be safe. We just don't know how to build it safely. End of story. And, you know, it's not something we can expect research to solve at any point in the foreseeable future. We've been working on it for over decade, and we've made very little progress.

So, David, could you also explain what superintelligence is, something about which many have been warning, and how close artificial intelligence is to becoming super intelligent? That is to say, what would it mean for AI to exponentially outperform humans at everything? You've said if we get to superintelligence, this would be the most significant event in all of human history, David. Yes. So there's a lot of different terms here. General intelligence, superintelligence. Some people like to call superintelligence godlike AI to emphasize just how much more

powerful and intelligent AI could get than humans. So, you know, right now we're kind of building AI systems that are very good at certain things like coding, math. They have very wide, you know, knowledge of roughly everything that's on the internet. But there's still not as good as people at some forms of common sense reasoning and things like this. So we're still not at the point where AI is really as smart as a person in every relevant regard. But that's just what people call like human level or AGI, human level AI. And then the concern is that not only will we have those AI systems, which already could take everybody,

job and completely disrupt society, but shortly thereafter, AI might get vastly more intelligent than humans. And so just like, you know, people are using AI to make novel medical breakthroughs and, you know, hack computer systems and find bugs that nobody did for decades and solve unsolved math problems, they could also develop, you know, incredibly powerful and dangerous new technology, like new forms of biological weapons, for instance. And besides that sort of of like, you know, technological ability, they would also be very good at sort of, you know, the social engineering manipulation, like strategy, all of these things that allow humans to, like, get ahead in society and have power over each other. We're talking about AIs that are like able to think,

you know, two steps ahead of the smartest, most strategic people, or 10 steps ahead. We just have 30 seconds, David. This recursive self-improvement. We just have 30 seconds. Are you? concerned about the transformation of warfare by AI? Absolutely. Yeah. So a lot of times people I've talked to are like, I don't think we're going to lose control. I don't think it's going to wipe us out. I'll be worried when I start to see, you know, killer robots marching in the streets. And a lot of my colleagues have said that, and a lot of my colleagues have said they would never work at a company that was doing that kind of

work. And unfortunately, all the AI companies now are working more and more with the military to automate more and more killing and military decision-making. And I think it's incredibly dangerous for really obvious reasons. It's dystopian. It's like straight out of Terminator. And I wish I would see more people like my colleague Alex Turner quit their jobs over this as they essentially promised they would years ago. I want to thank you so much for being with us, David.

David Kruger, Assistant Professor of Abus Reasoning and Responsible AI at the University of Montreal, founder of Evitable, a nonprofit that educates the public about the risks of AI. We'll link to your piece in USA today. No AI isn't inevitable. We should stop it while we can. David Kruger is at a massive AI conference in Las Vegas that's wrapping up today. Coming up in Pakistan administered Kashmir, the government's cracking down. Stay with us. Sunny Singh in our Democracy Now studio. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman with Nirmine Sheikh.

We turn now to Pakistan Administrative Kashmir, where dozens of people have been killed in clashes between security officials and protesters over the last two months. Control of the heavily militarized region of Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan. Seven years ago this week, India's right-wing, Modi government revoked Indian Kashmir's limited autonomy, bringing it under direct federal rule. In Pakistan administered Kashmir earlier this summer, a coalition of local politicians, activists and business leaders called the Joint Action of Army Committee, or the JAAC,

began protests over the soaring cost of living, but also demanding more political autonomy for the region. In response, the Pakistani government banned the group under counter-terrorism laws and shut down the internet. As protests continued, the government responded with force, killing at least 40 people. The BBC spoke to a young man who was involved in the protests and did not want to be identified. We only asked for affordable flour, electricity and our basic rights. Instead, our brothers are being killed. Why are live bullets being fired at us? The Pakistani government has now begun a sweeping new crackdown on international media

seeking to report from any areas outside the country's three major cities and has ordered all foreign media to leave Pakistan administered Kashmir immediately. Meanwhile, Pakistan's ruling parties in the lead in the first phases of local elections in the region and authorities claim an over 50% voter turnout despite calls for a boycott from the now-banned joint action of army committee. This is local resident Ali Omar explaining why people want to boycott the elections. Muzafarabad and Azad Kashmir are not in a condition where elections can be held here. The internet is shut down and everyday life has completely come to a standstill.

I think the reason people are boycotting is basically the Action Committee. Because of the oppression and atrocities that were inflicted on the Action Committee, people feel sympathy for them. For more, we're joined in London by the award-winning Kashmiri novelist and journalist Mirza Vaheed. His books include The Collaborator and The Book of Gold Leaves, his forthcoming book, Mariam and Son. Thank you so much, Mirza, for joining us. We only have a few minutes.

What is happening in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir? And for the global audience to understand this area. Thank you for having me. Pakistan and Sir Kashmir, you know, for as long been portrayed as self-governed, autonomous, Orazov, meaning free. And it's been a little bit of safe. compared to where I come from where I grew up, which is Indian-Answit Kashmir.

But this changes that, just punctures that picture to some extent, because, and as your clips show, there's deep dissatisfaction with local governance structures. So Kashmiris in that part of Kashmir basically are saying that while the larger issue remains unresolved, their basic rights, political rights, economic rights, they need to be addressed. They can't wait forever for those rights to be given to them. I've been reading about what's been happening on the ground. The discontent is not recent. It's been simmering another surface for a while,

and now it's kind of burst out the open. The Pakistan state has not handled this very well at all, because the violence that we've seen in the last few weeks is chillingly reminiscent of what we used to see in Indian-Amsar Kashmir. Of course, there are big parallels, big divergences. In Indian-Urishmirates, there's been decades of militarization and repression and oppression. Here, the unrest is recent. some chilling parallels in terms of indiscriminate use of violence, cutting off the entire

region from the rest of the world, no internet, people who are wounded not going to hospitals for fairer appraisals. So this reminded me of the city I grew up in Srinagar. And I think one of the underlying issues also is that the whole region is not as developed as that's Pakistan. So while the Pakistani state has always maintained that this is our favorite child, as one of the government spokesman recently put it, or Kashmir is the juggler way in Pakistan. It's not as developed as the rest of Pakistan. There are 27% unemployment among youth in Pakistan and Kashmir. That tells you a lot about what's been going underneath.

And now all these grievances, you know, about increasing prices, unemployment, healthcare infrastructure, they have coalesced into a larger, broader critique of the political arena, by which I mean that this committee that you mentioned JAC, they have been demanding that the 12 seats reserved for in the local assembly for refugees from Indian National National to Kashmir who came to this part of Kashmir post-partition, they should be abolished because they believe that you know, out of a number of 53 total seats if you have 12 which are reserved, that under mine's local representation. I hope I have kind of clarified this. Very

quickly, Mirza, yes, you have. If you could just say, you know, the history of the region, the division of Kashmir, India, Pakistan, and then also the smallest bit, China and the colonial legacy that led to this situation in the first place. I think this is, we can see, this is

the rupture of the partition and we are seeing these splinters, you know, again and again, in all parts of Kashmir. So in 1947, Kashmir was this one stage, called Jammu and Kashmir State. And it was split between India and Pakistan because they couldn't agree

on a solution. They said they're going to solve it later via a referendum, via plebiscite, which has never taken place. And then they fought wars over Kashmir, at least three wars. And recently last year, they fought, you know, they fought this air battle after

Indian tourists were killed in Indonesia. So it will flare up. It will always flare up. And the region is now, obviously, both these places are governed by India. India controls Indian-Altfutkish meat, you know, with the iron grip. Pakistani state has claimed that this region is relatively free, is Assad. But we all know, there's nominal autonomy there. So it is a legacy of partition. And the division was quite arbitrary. It was, you know, it's a line drawn. Ten seconds, Marissa.

Sorry? Ten seconds. Okay. So it's the division is all. And there are not. rights. Basically, it's a struggle for dignity on both sides. We want to thank you so much for being with us, and we will continue to follow this. Mayor's O'ahi, Journalist, an award-winning Kashmary novelist. That does it for our show. I'll be in Edinburgh, Scotland, the King's Theater on August 11th and on August 12th, throwing of Steal the Story plays at the Bertha Dockhouse in London. Right now, we're here in New York.

I'm Amy Goodman with Nermyn Scheher.