The Highwire with Del Bigtree - ARE WE HEADED TOWARDS A DIGITAL DOOMSDAY?

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

While MIT scientists and the newly elected Pope voice growing concerns about the profound challenges artificial intelligence may pose to humanity, two of the world’s top AI pioneers are reportedly building private doomsday bunkers. At the same time, record-high levels of annotated web traffic—largely driven by bots—and the explosion of AI-generated social media accounts are raising serious alarms about the future of digital trust and human agency.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

One of the things we've done in this show since we started is we show the viewers' narratives that are not popular, perhaps, but are going to become the major conversation talking points throughout America and definitely the world, too. We did that with COVID. But one of the conversations, you reached out to me and said, look, we covered artificial intelligence last week, and a lot of the public was giving you feedback saying that was very important. So I wanted to jump back in here because this seems to be one of the biggest conversation we could be facing as humanity right now. Last week, we showed MIT scientists. There's basically saying we need to test this like we tested the nuclear bomb like Oppenheimer did for its effects on, you know, to eradicate humanity. Luckily, the nuclear bomb did do that. But we have MIT scientists.

This is the headline. AI firms warned to calculate threat of superintelligence or risk at escaping human control. And then we also have the new Pope, Pope Leo the 14th, lays out a vision and identifies AI as the main challenge for humanity. So you have the Catholic Church even. backing this and saying, look, this is what you have to watch out for. This is the main challenge that we see as one of the world's biggest religious organizations that could be a threat to humanity. So you have these figureheads saying this, but we also have the inventors, the people with their hands on this tech that are giving, I guess, not so subtle warnings. One of these was in a recent

article. This is Ilya Sutskiever. Illia Sutskiever is the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI. He was. He was the brain behind the large language model that helped create and build chat GPT. And this is the article. We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI. And so you go into this article and it says this. This is him, quote, allegedly. Once we all get into the bunker, he began, according to a researcher who was present. This was at a meeting. The researcher says, I'm sorry. The researcher interrupted. The bunker. We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI. Sutskeeper replied. To other sources I spoke with confirm that Suttskieper commonly mentioned such a bunker.

There's a group of people, Ilya, being one of them, who believe that building AGI would bring about a rapture. The researchers told me literally a rapture. He declined to comment on that story. You would think he would at least say, no, I didn't say that. He hadn't said it. That's so scary. Yeah, silence speaks volumes in that one.

So, I don't know, is anybody else building bunkers these days that is connected to tech? Well, we have Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg is in the headlines as well alongside of Sutskyver. And this is the headline here. Mark Zuckerberg insists that the 5,000 square foot underground structure and his secret Hawaii compound is not a doomsday bunker. It's just a place where he plays Xbox with the boys on the weekends

when he's not building AI. But the conversation here is clearly the Internet is changing. And it's changing very quickly. And the conversation that the public gets to input in this, You got the creators wanting to build bunkers. We're kind of sitting here going, oh, this can transcribe our Zoom calls. That's about it. But I want to get into a theory.

We talk about conspiracy theories coming true a lot. One of the conspiracy theories is what's called the dead internet theory. It's been going around for a long time, over a decade on the internet. And you go to Forbes, and Forbes actually wrote about this, just to explain what this is the audience. And this is, they say the debt internet theory is a belief that the vast majority of internet traffic, posts and users, have been replaced by bots and AI generated content, and that people no longer shape the direction of the internet. So that questions who's shaping the direction of the internet. Wow.

But again, that was a conspiracy theory for a very long time. But now we have a cyber security firm that put out their 2025 annual report. It's called a bot report. And this is Imperva. And they said this. For the first time in a decade, automated traffic has surpassed human activity, accounting for 51% of all web traffic. What the heck?

So I want to describe a bot is basically a robot. robot. It's a computer, it's a software program that is working on the internet to imitate typically human beings, human behavior. And so that, according to Imperva, these bots are now starting to take over the internet. Again, this conspiracy theory seems like it's coming true to a certain extent. And we go into an article written about that that cybersecurity report and it says, the rise in bots is down to generative artificial intelligence, Imperva said. This is the same technology that now flirts with people online for you

and automatically writes heartfelt, consolidary emails on behalf of heartless administrators. This tech has made it easier to create bots that do your bidding, while some of those bots are benign, not all have your best interest at heart. You want to talk about a feedback loop. I mean, not only you're not,

you know, as you talk to the people that just agree with you, now you may not be talking to anybody at all, just a bunch of bots that are agreeing with you. Right. I mean, they could just isolate you now into your own little world and you wouldn't even know it. Right. Or maybe they're not agreeing with you.

Maybe they're causing you to believe something that's not true. And there's that too. Or emotionally tugging on something to create an emotional contagion. I mean, there's so many questions that need to be answered here. And so there is an FTC trial going on right now against META, Instagram, and some really interesting documents were found via discovery there. And this is the headline. Meta's exec's frantic warning about Instagram's alarming fake activity numbers in spotlight at FTC trial.

So this is from a 2018 email. It says this is them writing this from 2018. chat GPT before AI was unleashed, before generative AI, anything. 2018, they say, by some estimates, fake engagement could be in range of 40% the executive wrote in a memo he attached to an email to Masori. The executive, whose name is redacted from the court papers, push Masari to commit more resources to meta's well-being team, warning that a loss of public trust is the greatest threat we have, and that left unchecked it will be crushing for the company.

So they're saying there, look, if people knew that 40% of their engagement is, fake. Our company's done. Our business model's over. We need to figure this out. Who we're selling to? Who who is my audience? If I'm just talking to a non-audience, a fake audience, then what's the use of this platform? Yeah. And so it's really interesting to see. Are you all real out there? I mean, it makes you wonder like, what's happening with the high wire? You guys, if you have a pulse, prove it right now in the comments. How would you prove you're a real human being? I'm curious. You're real. I'm real. I know I'm real. This is real. This is real. That's real. So I want to know what happened between 2018 that conversation and now for meta, because now the headlines coming out of meta is this great new PR push.

This is the headlines. Meta opens floodgates, the word floodgates, for AI generated accounts on Facebook and Instagram. So apparently they thought this sounds like a great idea. Let's just maximize this. 51% of the internet, not enough. We want 100%. We got 99% of the internet. And so the conversation of the dead internet theory, it goes a little.

further because it seeks, it's playing on people that are vulnerable, it's playing on people that have maybe challenges with mental health, there's a loneliness epidemic, all of this plays into how these AI bots are interacting, perhaps interfering with people's lives. And one of the big spotlights right now is a story from a Florida boy. This is the headline when it happened. Florida boy 14 killed himself after falling in love with a Game of Thrones AI chat bot. And it says in this article on at least one occasion when Sewell, that's the boy, expressed suicidality to character AI. That's the program.

Character AI continued to bring it up through the Disnari's chat bot over and over state's papers first reported by the New York Times. And it has an image in here. This was the last chat he had with this artificial intelligence before this boy killed himself. And we're putting this out there because this is a warning. And you can see here, he says, I promise I will, this is him, I promise I will come home I love you so much, Danny.

I love you too, Nario. Please, this is the AI. Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love. He says, what if I can come home right now? And the AI says, please do my sweet king. That was the last thing he wrote. And what this has led to is a landmark free speech court case. AI versus free speech is the headline.

This is a lawsuit that could set landmark ruling, following teen suicide. So this is the first case ever to decide whether AI is speech or not, because it's not a product of the human mind. So is it covered under the Constitutionist free speech? This is brave new world stuff. That is really, really confusing and scary. And it's going to be a real issue for all these companies

that are just letting AIs do so many things for them. It's about to become our doctor, as I've said in many ways. I think you're going to see a destruction of the medical profession because an AI can push a drug just as easily as a human being can with all the telemedicine and everything.