AI and the Anti-AI Movement are Threats

There are good reasons to be concerned about AI and good reasons to be concerned about the anti-AI movement whose rhetoric is rife with alarmism and short on facts.

An instant moral panic with pop-up experts has led to bad policy decisions before.

The D.C. governmental phase of the movement began when Sen. Bernie Sanders, an 84-year-old socialist politician whose previous position on technology was that he had no apps on his phone, didn’t seem to recognize the names of major platforms, and had a woman named ‘Melissa’ tell him what he was doing, suddenly announced that he was teaming up with Chinese AI professors for an AI ‘safety’ event at the U.S. Capitol.

This was followed by a ‘Pro-Human Assembly’ featuring Sanders, teachers’ union boss Randi Weingarten, actress Ashley Judd, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Stephen Bannon under the auspices of the Future of Life Institute: which had been involved in the China-Sanders event. Last year, the Institute issued a PhD fellowship proposal for US-China AI governance, urging “global governance” to reduce “the risks associated with a US-China AI competition” and the deployment of advanced AI systems.

Future of Life’s ‘Human Statement’ was endorsed by Susan Rice, Bannon, Ralph Nader, Annie Lennox, Stephen Fry and Xiaohu Zhu, the founder of China’s ‘Center for Safe AGI’: a senior researcher at China’s Nanjing University and a member of the ‘Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI’ that is pressing for a global governance deal with China to limit AI development.

The ‘Coalition’ bills this as a ‘Deal of the Century’, a “fast-tracked, temporary bilateral China-US AI treaty to enact controls” over AI in an ‘open call’ endorsed by a number of figures and organizations including Zhu. The Coalition, which is headquartered in Rome, also claims to be “forming a steering board of US AI treaty-advocacy organizations” and to have engaged “ media figures (e.g. Bannon, Carlson, Rogan)”.

“It may be tempting to succumb to powerlessness, by sticking our heads in the sand or watching doom unfold from the sidelines. But how can we find true peace or look our children in the eyes if we do not at least try to do something to save their future?” The Coalition’s open call clamors. What are we saving them from? Who’s about to doom our children? The same canned rhetoric from previous crises is being dusted off again.

And what is the ‘Coalition’ really calling for? A “powerful and democratic global federal organization with exclusive control over all potentially dangerous AI research, facilities, and source materials.” China isn’t ‘democratic’, so democracy is out, but this organization would be global and would be able to employ a good deal of power.

The Coalition proposes an “intergovernmental constituent assembly” that would then be “extensible to other inherently global challenges and public goods, like climate, nuclear, bioweapons, and our digital public sphere.” That last part is particularly worrying because it implies the idea of a global system for controlling speech.

If this sounds familiar, that’s the exact same ‘fix’ that had been previously advanced for nuclear weapons, global warming and disinformation. Define an urgent threat, propose global governance as the solution, and panic the public into going along.

The rash of ‘pop-up’ organizations no one had ever heard of before demanding AI regulation through a deal with China follows the familiar pattern of ‘disinformation’ groups that appeared in 2016 claiming to offer expertise on the dangers of online speech and demanding urgent government intervention. In a matter of months, the media, politicians and activists were citing a network of ‘experts’ warning that democracy would soon fall apart without government control over public speech.

And some of the organizations advancing anti-AI hysteria have a history with anti-disinformation.

The ‘Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI’ was spun off from Rufo Guerreschi’s Trustless Computing Association. Trustless was a platform for promoting ‘Seevik’ (civic) , a device that promised to fight ‘disinformation’ by having everyone carry a $200 Seevik encryption around with them to “create and regulate a new global democratic digital public sphere and defend democratic institutions from the rise of authoritarianism.”

Seevik never went anywhere, so Guerreschi, who lists a degree in architecture through Arizona State and one from the University of Miami, and an MS in Urban Planning switched to AI hysteria. It’s not clear how his expertise in urban planning qualifies him for regulating AI.

PauseAI US, another member of the Coalition, which is calling for “a global, indefinite pause on frontier AI research until we know that it’s safe”, was founded and is headed by Holly Elmore, a Harvard PhD in Evolutionary Biology, who went to work as an expert on animal welfare, fighting against rat poison, for Rethink Priorities, a left-wing environmentalist group from the Effective Altruism movement, and then formed PauseAI and suddenly became an AI expert.

In Holly’s own words, “I was working on wild animal welfare, which is thinking about the welfare of wild animals. But it’s an interesting field. I was pretty qualified to do it, even though it’s such a new field – who really has qualifications – because I have a PhD in evolutionary biology.” But then “around that time, ChatGPT came out and eventually I got so taken by the possibility of pushing for a pause, once I saw that there was such support among the American public for it that I thought, ‘This is a huge opportunity. I have to take it.’”

The young woman is now all over the media and social media tweeting, “I want to write an op-ed about how the AI company execs and employees deserve jail” and “It’s not okay to be friends with people who are risking the entire world and the future of humanity. It’s just not. Stop protecting them and making them comfortable. You are taking part in their crime when you tolerate their recklessness.”

There are legitimate concerns about AI, but the anti-AI hysterics are rarely grounded in any kind of specific concerns and facts. Instead, much as with global warming, it’s heavy on freak-outs and short on science, and unlike global warming, can’t even seem to articulate the threat.

Actual dangers from AI can be regulated the way we regulate all other products. The anti-AI movement is hyping Sci-Fi intangibles about a superintelligence while using as its example chatbots that have trouble understanding simple commands. And their agenda is about a whole lot more than AI: it’s “extensible” to our entire lives.

gold-plated surveillance is the ultimate goal for the ruling elites, but the nearest ‘emergency’ for us (mom and pop citizens) in AI is the bubble that the so called ‘hyperscalers’ have created on the back of nvidia (Ed Zitron). the lehman event from that bursting will kick us all in the nether regions.

too bad for all of us who wanted nothing to do with it.

Good piece by Greenfield. Most of the info is new to me but none is surprising. The coordinated rollout of the AI alarmism has had the distinct feel of a leftist op. They’ve even found three flakey conservatives — Bannon, Carlson, Rogan — to play the role of useful idiot, apparently.

It would seem reasonable to at least pause the data centers for awhile if one likes electricity.

This is not about data centers. It's about opposition to AI itself. Opposing a technology is totally absurd, just as opposing the introduction of electricity, automobiles, computers would have been.

The new data centers are supplying their own electricity with gas turbines - if the enviros will let them. For example:

Elon Musk’s xAI facility is using gas turbines in South Memphis, we’re taking action

This is known as electric power "behind the meter". I believe 100% of the new data centers are providing their own power, rather than hooking up to the electric grid. For one thing, it takes too long for the approvals.

I would say Carlson is mainly interested in getting attention at this point in time. Probably Bannon as well. I’m not sure about Rogan. He’s not really a conservative anyway.

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