I was considering something like President TinMan, but Grok came up with PresidentBot and I promised it would get full credit for that. Gotta be nice to the new rulers if you know what’s good for you 🙂 Seriously, now, I’m so fed up with what’s going on in the world that I’ve been asking myself if we wouldn’t be better off with an AI supreme leader. Many of us watching the rise of AI are afraid we may come to a point where machines take over the world… So? How could it be worse?
The Paperclip Apocalypse
The Paperclip problem started as a thought experiment in 2014 and refers to an AI tasked with producing… paperclips. And it never stops. Ends up fighting humans for resources to produce more paperclips. And we’d be powerless to stop it as the AI is much smarter. You get the gist. How could it be worse than what’s happening in Europe these days?
Our so-called leaders are planning to spend hundreds of billions we don’t have on weapons we don’t need. Russia and the US are talking peace, but in Europe the mainstream media has daily articles on World War III. No kidding! Our so-called leaders are fighting us for resources in their demented goal to drag us into a war of their own creation. At least paperclips don’t have the potential to fuck up the planet for ever.
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The Weak Link
In our conversation this morning, Grok pointed out my AI-utopia has a weak link, namely the humans writing the code for PresidentBot. I am quite pleased to say I could counter that with the idea of AI writing the code for the supreme AI. Grok admitted it is entirely feasible in the near future. 2030 by its own estimate.
Technology could should must help us get rid of our worst enemy - ourselves. We’ve struggled for most of our history and in the past 2,000 years we’ve had maybe a handful of decent leaders. That was before, when you’d need a few years of heavy fighting to kill a few million people. At present, we can do that in mere hours. Can we afford an idiot like Macron brandishing his nuclear warheads at Russia which has ten times as many, or even more? Also, that’s backward thinking as the current fight is who controls the most powerful AI.
AI is our newest toy and one of the first things we’ve put it to use is war - as in assessing battlefield options in Ukraine. Gaza, too, I expect. Instead of using such powerful technology to better our lives, our human leaders used it to kill their perceived enemies. Can we be trusted with even more powerful technology that is sure to emerge in the next decades?
The Hard Choice
Grok pointed out AI might choose efficiency over equity. We might not like that, true. But then again we already have unelected leaders who think there’s too many of us and roll out vaccines to kill or sterilize people.
Any given day there’s people starving in some place or another, yet farmers in Europe are pressured into giving up their lands, while sheep or chicken are culled under various pretexts. Could AI be more devious than that? Maybe.
Grok also pointed out an AI might miss nuances like joy or human suffering. Do those clamoring that the war in Ukraine must go on for at least another five years spare any thought for the human suffering involved? Does anyone care about those mourning their loved ones today in Gaza?
The obvious answer to our current problems would be to colonize Mars and any other planets we can reach, so we solve the overpopulation and dwindling resources problems.
Obviously, with PresidentBot in charge it might simply decide we’re too damn dangerous to be allowed to roam the galaxy.
P.S. - Woke up to the news Heathrow airport is closed for the day, with over 1,300 flights up in the air, so to speak. I was wondering if anyone knows how to say “Oops” in Russian. Asking for a friend.
WWIII I can work with...but you start closing airports and it gets serious fast.
Luton's fine, no worries:)
Sarakie marked safe :))
Presidentbot? No thanks! Have you seen The Terminator? I'd rather take my chances with human leaders. At least we know a knife through the heart will kill them. I'm not certain they are entirely human though and if they are, that they're not hosting some alien entity.
As for AI, is it possible we could actually create 'intelligence' when we don't understand how our own works? We don't even understand how our own body's systems work for gawd sake.
That said, if we take their vaccines and train their AI for them, perhaps we're getting what we deserve.
Good point. However, my problem with our current leaders is not their intelligence or lack of, but their lack of character. Being utterly corrupt with closets brimming of skeletons, they're easy to blackmail even if, by miracle, they'd have a shred of morality. At least an AI would be immune to that.
Also, you don't need to tell me about the dangers of training AI ourselves :) My son is quite adamant on that topic and won't have anything to do with AI. I lost my job to ChatGPT two years ago... yet, I don't think there's anything we can do to stop AI. Might turn out to be a terrible invention but the cat is out of the bag, the train has left the station, the milk has been spilled and so on.
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STOPLooking back throughout history humans have done an extremely shitty job of governing themselves. The problem with AI-governance is once the genie is out of the bottle it would be very hard to put it back. But there's a great argument for the fact that the genie has already been released. If that's true, the choice has already been made for us.
America is in such turmoil right now. I'm not sure how much if it is making the international news. People are being brainwashed into believing DOGE is stealing their Social Security benefits and Elon is a Nazi. Those who have benefited from the decades-long corruption are in complete panic mode. Meanwhile, the extreme left are burning down and vandalizing anything associated with Tesla. I don't see how Elon escapes from having to step down as CEO (which is a shame).
It's equally as wild to watch how geopolitics is playing out but I must say it's easier than ever to discern who the bad guys are. Sorry for the novel I wrote here. Lol.