The Highwire with Del Bigtree - IS AI AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO HUMANITY?

Episode Date: April 27, 2024

We’re told an AI takeover of humanity is inevitable. Without discussion, this technology has been foisted upon us. Is there really something more in-store for us all?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

While AI is sad that it cannot touch quite yet, you know, I find myself really, I mean, I think you can see it. I want to make a joke here and I can't imagine what the joke would be. I laid staring at the ceiling and I really thought, you know, how am I going to train my children? What will be the talents that they can have so that they will not only now have to rise up through the billions of people that are your competition? which is what we've all had to deal with, but now those billions of people are going to be, I think many of them starving in the streets, we're going to be competing with computers.

Right. I mean, this is the conversation of our time. I mean, just look what spell check has done to people's ability to spell and write complete sentences. I mean, just that little nuance alone. It really dumps people down when machines do all of the work. But the idea of data mining people and you, mining people and using this information for a purpose is nothing new. We see just recently a headline here. Businesses have been doing this for a very long time.

Chase Bank is the newest to jump in here. Here's a headline. JPMorgan Chase cashes in on customer data. So they're monetizing it's 80 million customers spending data. They're individual purposes. They're now giving those to companies, allowing companies to sift through those so these companies can target ads directly to you from your personal purchases. So Facebook, no different. Facebook has been data mining its users for quite some time. Facebook users personal data sent to thousands of companies as a study. So AI is, it represents this huge next step of this. It's looking at everything humans have ever created, this digitalized world that we are increasingly in. Everything is online. We have surveillance systems, tracking systems

that are feeding in through cameras, through our individual transactions. It's all feeding into this global digitalized system. And AI is there just data mining the analytical nuance of our behaviors. And so we see things like chat GTP and Google's Gemini. And you can't help think that there's a hidden or maybe not so hidden hand sometimes adding some guardrails to this and directing it, although people are saying this thing is on the loose and it can't be controlled. It sure seems like some of these companies are choosing to focus on some data sets more than others. But there's a conversation that went viral just recently, and it was with two people from the Singularity University, and that was Peter Diamantis and Salim Ishmael. And what they talked

about was kind of the current state as they see it for AI. And if anybody doesn't know, the Singular University has been really one of the places at the heart of developing this technology out very quickly and really advocating for it. So take a listen to this. Hold on a second. I just also want to point out singularity for those that may be brand new to this topic is this term that came up and as I understand it is the moment in which the computers will gain consciousness or AI will gain consciousness. Its intelligence and its growth will reach a point where it's so fast that it essentially becomes aware of itself, I believe, is what the sort of the generic or, you know, his statement is, is that the moment the computer becomes aware of itself as having a

consciousness, now we're in a whole different world. So that singularity, singularity university, and I believe it's like 2040, as Kurtzweiler had said that he believed singularity would happen right around somewhere like 2040. I wonder if we're ahead based on what I just saw these songs and what's happening. I wonder if we're ahead of schedule or on schedule. He had mentioned a talk 2045, but these timetables obviously are moving quite a bit. And, you know, It's at the point where this computer system begins to improve itself exponentially and just surpasses humanity. And humanity has to merge with it. So these are two of the people from that university, top people talking about the current state of AI.

Take a listen. We see no mechanism of any way possible of limiting AI and its spread and its propagation and its development, like zero. I agree. You cannot be contained. Unless you control every line of code written. and the AIs are writing the code. Yeah. And by the way, as far as we can see, the genies out of the bottle.

It is. You know, there were two absolutes five years ago. Don't put it on the web and don't allow it to code itself. And guess what? Both of those barriers were broken instantly. Instantly. And the minute chat UPT connected to GitHub with all of the code base there and learned through that and now it can control anything.

it can write its own programming, pretty much you're done. So there was a small possibility, but even then it was going to happen at some point. And if we didn't do it, the Chinese would do it or the North Koreans would do it. Somebody would do it and it was going to happen. Right. So there was an inevitability to it that I don't think is stoppable in any way, shape, or form. I think guiding it is the only path we have going forward. I agree.

I'm sort of belatedly, Jeffrey. My sister called me recently. It says some of these shows, you've got to give like a red pill warning that they're so shocking. It's like you've got to prepare yourself. I'm a little late to the punch, but I think this is one of those stories that should have a red pill warning. That is so terrifying with these two guys at the top of this technology space are saying it's too late. We already broke the two major tenants that we had. don't ever put AI, don't ever let it have access to the internet, and don't let it code itself.

And right out of the starting gate, some, you know, genius decided, hey, let's see what this happens. This isn't a dash of pepper in a soup. This thing is now currently, as we speak, going, blal-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-taking. All the information of the world as we know it and how we move, how we think. And these two aren't unbiased observers. These are two people that have been, you know, pushing for this technology to rapidly integrate with humanity for some time now. But I want to talk about Ray Kurzweil, you mentioned him. He is one of the other founders of the Singularity University.

He's written a lot about this. And just to give an idea of this camp of thinking that these guys are talking from, Ray Kurzweil wrote a chapter in a book. The book is titled The Scientific Conquest of Death. And he's talking about a new version of the human body. And in this book, this was about 20 years ago, he says by 2030, electronics will utilize molecule-sized circuits. The reverse engineering of the human brain will have been completed. It will be routine practice to have billions of nanobuts, nanoscale robots, coursing through

the capillaries of our brains, communicating with each other over a wireless local area network, as well as with our biological neurons and with the internet. One application will be to provide full immersion virtual reality that encompasses all our senses. So this is their stated goal of what's going to happen. This isn't, hey, we need to write some better songs. Maybe we can help find a new medicine. This stuff is going in your brain. I mean, this is the extreme of the extreme. So I understand that's where they're talking from. And one of the points they said is if we didn't do this, China would have done it or North Korea would have done it. Coming from the health space and especially COVID, where have we heard that before?

that's biosafety level for genetic engineering of controlled pathogens to make them so dangerous that they can cause a pandemic because hey if we don't do it some terrorists might do it this is not an excuse to do this and the last point on this is they said we knew five years ago that the one thing we shouldn't do is put this thing on the internet and let it code itself well that may not be true because almost 10 years ago there This is something that is very public. The Obama White House in 2015 put forth a challenge, literally called a nanotechnology-inspired grand challenge. And what was their idea? It was to develop transformational computing capabilities. It was asking all sectors, hey, what can you do? Show us the best you have.

And what were they looking to do? Well, we go into this document. And this is the call they put out really to the world. They said, achieving this grand challenge will lead to many game-changing capabilities, addressing the following technology priorities shared by multiple federal agencies, intelligent big data sensors that act autonomously and are programmable via the network for increased flexibility and that support communication with other network nodes

while maintaining security and avoiding interference with the things being sensed. What if the things being sensed are us? What if they're tracking us? And now it's autonomous. I mean, that certainly sounds like, don't put it on the internet. That sounds like activated. But let's go further. In this, it says technology that enables, this is where they're looking for, technology that enables trusted and secure operation of complex platforms, energy or weapon systems

that require software or a combination of multiple codes so complicated that it exceeds a human's ability to write and verify the software and its performance. And then it goes on to further say, autonomous or semi-autonomous platforms supporting the observed, orient, decide, and act. So you're talking conscious right there. process for both military and civilian purposes, such as transportation, medicine, scientific discovery, exploration, and disaster response. So what does that sound like to you? That doesn't sound like, hey, we really need to not put this on the internet, let it code,

not let it become self-conscious. That sounds like we're going to race to do this and plug the military into it and federal agencies. It's really crazy. And so short-sighted, really, the idea that being once you got this ruling, this is what no one thought about, how do you say? stop it. Well, I mean, they should have thought about it. There's only been how many science fiction movies, you know, that have been dealing with this. And I think about, again, like the future, where does this go? What are the jobs? I mean, how many people will be laid off in the next,

I would say two years, 10 year, five years? How long is this going to take before people just start saying, we don't need you, we don't need that person, we don't need this, we got that covered and it becomes cost effective. Right now, what we just showed is it's going to be far more cost effective now. I think it costs $5 a month for 500 songs. So what company isn't going to just use that to write its jingles, right? So how many people just lost it there? Right. You know, when you have copywriters, copywriters, I mean, that job's already being done by chat GPT. I know somebody that said, hey, when I was talking about it, I talked to a lot of people this week about it. I said, have you seen this day? I played the songs. I'm like, it's really been a subject

that's bothering me. And a friend of mine said, oh, man, there's a website you can go to that will run all of your advertising for you, including your social media. It'll post slogans. It'll give you, you know, things that put out by your company. It'll write songs. It'll put it out on the internet. He said, and look, if you want the commercial to have your voice, like a radio voice, he's like, I read a paragraph, and then it just used my voice from then on. And it sounded just, just like me speaking to the public. And then you think about that. I mean, we are just seconds away.

We know this where the videos, the deep fake videos, that the AI is going to be able to create our images, make us, make anyone be able to say anything at any time. How will we know what the truth is? How will we know if we're even looking at the real president of the United States? Or some fake that's out there trying to confuse everybody. What will happen in news? I mean, Jeffrey, I guess I really am headed at the moment.

It feels like we are right on the verge of just a massive chaos-inducing problem. And it's a question of what will it take for society to take this seriously? Because in the past it's been people like Elon Musk warning about this or other people saying, hey, this may be, you want to put some breaks on this. And we're talking about, you know, generating texts, generating songs, using this marketing, we run a Zoom call. What happens when we start generating digital humans? Take a look.

All right. What we're building here is a computer that can learn. So this is baby. She's sort of looking at us and hearing us. So if I make loud noise, she'll get a fright. This is what she can see. So you can see my face here.

Hey, see that? So she's not copying my smile. She's responding to me. And now this is her little first, baby's first, word book so you can pick a pick a page and I show her something but she has to be looking at it so get her attention hi baby hi hi what do you see what's this puppy puppy very good what's that baby this is because we're in New Zealand you've got to show her sheep yeah I'll give her the word yeah hi baby hi

what do you see baby sheep very good baby I mean I mean I mean I mean I mean, again, for some people, it looks fun. It looks like a toy. I think about all the strange people that aren't mentally healthy, what they're going to do with things like this. And imagine that's on a computer screen. What happens when it's actually in a bot sitting in your house, say a real child or an adult? And you're programming it. And this is where it really gets disturbing.

And where I would sort of challenge the two guys that were speaking is that, well, we just have to control it. as though there's one central hub by which AI, this is what we're going to do with your brain. It's not what this is, right? With open AI, all of these different people, with all of these different agendas, with all of these different psychological issues they have themselves, are building their own versions of what AI can do as we speak. There's a army, if you will, of different AI incarnations that are being created right now by evolved human beings and by less evolved human beings. and all of it is now worldwide. It's in everyone's hands.

So I don't know what they're talking about. It's not like there's one single plug. And I think we look at the benefits of perhaps Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies. One of the things at these conferences I go to is it's too big now. No government can stop it. I'm still waiting to see if that's the case. But they're saying because these nodes, it's already in so many people's different hands. It's literally every cell phone is carrying the information.

You cannot pull it back. You cannot stop it. So in the case of cryptocurrency, it's the argument that this is now put the power back into the hands of the people and not the governments. There's a benevolent look at that. But we also have with AI the same problem. It's too big to stop now. It's now already in everyone's hands to do with it what they think they should be doing. And you have to imagine not all of it's benevolent.