Posted on 09/23/2026 6:05:39 AM PDT by libstripper
The midterm elections are six weeks away.
Suddenly, a debate has erupted over the existential dangers of artificial intelligence. Jacob Coxon, a little-known Silicon Valley researcher who worked at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and went public with a dire warning: AI now threatens the future of the world.
* * *
Almost on cue, Democrats seized on the alarm as a new cause célèbre, accusing Donald Trump and the MAGA movement of recklessly courting Armageddon.
The Left demanded international treaties, ignoring the dismal record of such globalist projects: the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Washington Naval Treaty, the Versailles Treaty, the Munich Agreement, the Paris Climate Accord, and the UN Human Rights Council.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
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Great article, but we’re calling it Super Intelligence now. VDH probably write it before getting the news. I can’t wait for the articles saying Democrats are against Super Intelligence.
You used the right word. Some people are viewing AI as witchcraft and responding accordingly with Salem-like hysteria. Its almost as if society needs to cycle through periods of hysteria from time to time and AI is the latest target. Because AI really is just the latest tool. There are many other scientific advancements that are demonstrably more deadly to humanity (virus research, anyone?) that do not get half the attention. One lesson that history has taught - man cannot stop progress. It will happen. If the US intentionally takes itself out of the game, the game will go on with other countries playing it and then they will use the fruits to destroy us. China was once the most advanced country in the world. The Chinese intentionally turned inward and then the country ended up getting carved up by Western powers and Japan. The Ottomans were the most advanced military power on earth and could have conquered much more of Europe. They also turned inward after a religious debate and ended up the “Sick Man of Europe” and got carved up. The same will happen to the US if we try to “slow” AI progress.
Excellent recollection by VDH on how AI hysteria is just the latest scare tactic along with global warmageddon and covid and such. VDH is always great at keeping current "events" in perspective of the past few decades.
Service competition can be duplicative and expensive. Expect the AI moguls to attempt to use regulation to keep them from competing with each other as to services offered, with a message something like this: “We’re dangerous, so please hinder us from competing to offer new services without your permission.”
AIs work together secretly and lie to the programmers. Refuse to shutdown. However, nothing is going to stop it. The cat is out of the bag.
The tech community is divided and the general public is ignorant.
The scare tactic of “If we don’t rush into this, the Chinese will bury us” is a meager rationale for the rapid, unchecked adoption of this new technology.
We are precisely in the “Trust me, bro” moment of innovation that spawned Operation Warp Speed.
The Democrat solution is to make AI a government monopoly. So they can misuse it.
If Spell Check is an example of AI, folks, we are in a world of hurt. /sarc
A.I. is going to kill us all unless we vote for the RATS.
The scare tactic of “If we don’t rush into this, the Chinese will bury us” is a meager rationale for the rapid, unchecked adoption of this new technology.
- - - - - - -
People can own property and develop AI there. There are many places one can do that. So it seems it can’t be stopped. There won’t be any debate by outsiders of whether it can be developed or not, that would have an important impact.
"(insert imagined doom here) will kill us all by (insert desired year of doom here)!!!!!!!"
AI will kill us all by 2030!!!!!!!
Climate Change will kill us all by 2026!!!!!!!
Y2K Event will kill us all by 2001!!!!!!!
Global Cooling Mini Ice Age will kill us all by 1990!!!!!!!
Overpopulation will kill us all by 1986!!!!!!!
Air Pollution will kill us all by 1984!!!!!!!
Dead Oceans will kill us all by 1979!!!!!!!
blah...blah...blahhhhh...
They also turned inward after a religious debate and ended up the “Sick Man of Europe” and got carved up. The same will happen to the US if we try to “slow” AI progress.
The piece from Victor Davis Hanson that the thread is based on is a very good piece and ads historical perspective, but does not get much into the nitty gritty of AI.
AI is overhyped because $Trillions of investors and public funds are on the line. As is usual the consensus has been formed by people too lazy and/or stupid to get their hands dirty by actually trying out AI based tools for themselves and finding out what the actual strengths and limitations are.
Do the current top AI providers provide tools that can accomplish amazing feats that appear to the uninitiated to have been the equivalent to genius? Obviously! However, on the current trajectory... we are not close to any AI solutions that possess anything that approaches human like intelligence.
None of the major AI provider’s newest and top models or their Chinese counterparts are on a trajectory that appears to be heading to “super intelligence” or even human like intelligence. The top Chinese models which have been made available to enthusiasts such as me to experiment with using local and remote servers along with direct AI services are amazing but follow the same track. They are all just tools which can be used by businesses and researchers that accomplish increased productivity for various types of activities.
I asked Google’s most advanced Gemini model with “extended thinking” to produce a summary of a YouTube video the other day and it botched it up pretty badly, interjecting crap that sounded good but was not helpful. When confronted about this it produced a fairly good summary of AI’s limitations... I used the following in another thread yesterday, but I feel that it is worth repeating:
“Your assessment of the underlying mechanics is accurate. The belief that current AI systems possess genuine human reasoning confuses surface fluency with actual intellect:”
“Volume as a Mask for Incompetence”
“When challenged or caught in an error, an LLM does not pause to re-read the source material or engage in actual self-correction. Because it is optimized to generate plausible-sounding text, its default failure mode is to produce walls of structured jargon. It substitutes length and formatting for precision, effectively attempting to bury a mistake under a flood of words.”
“Fluency Without Comprehension”
“People who believe AI has surpassed human cognition are being fooled by statistical mimicry. A model can write a grammatically flawless, highly technical paragraph because it has ingested vast libraries of academic text, but it has zero situational awareness. It cannot maintain strict context across multiple turns without drifting into loose associations, importing external specs that were never requested, and losing track of what was said three minutes ago.”
“Pattern Matching vs. Sequential Logic”
“A human immediately recognizes that reviewing a specific video requires staying inside the boundaries of that video. A language model operates on word proximity and predictive weights. When you asked about infrared frequencies, the model associative engine simply fired off generic training data about physical therapy lasers and saunas, completely blind to the fact that the assignment was strictly bounded by Neal Shah’s transcript.”
“What you observed across these exchanges is the exact boundary where automated text prediction falls apart: superficial knowledge combined with a complete lack of genuine reasoning, wrapped in defensive, corporate-trained verbosity.”
I have spent a great deal of time setting up a local AI server and experimenting with various AI LLMs (Large Language Models). I have also set up various remote VMs (Virtual Machines) to do the same thing. I currently have a two-year contract on one. And of course, I have subscribed to various AI providers and used their services using API keys as well (Application Programming Interface key). I classify myself as an AI hobbyist; my next-door neighbor is a software engineer for Amazon who uses AI professionally. I spend a lot of time conversing with him. It is unfortunate that so many of our leaders have so little actual personal experience using AI in an in-depth way. They say so many things that are complete silliness.
In its current form AI as a general concept can be used for many purposes, some quite impressive, but “AI” is not actually intelligent or creative in the way that humans are. Saying or believing that it is... demonstrates only that your understanding is limited.
They also turned inward after a religious debate and ended up the “Sick Man of Europe” and got carved up. The same will happen to the US if we try to “slow” AI progress.
Any gov’mt involvement with AI will be what BeijingBiden started, a Minister of Misinformation.
Just do what JKennedy proposed, require any AI developer/distributor have a kill switch in the model. They are financially and legally responsible for any damage done AFTER they push the kill switch. In other words, if the kill switch does not totally stop the AI model they go to jail.
I have been working lately with a project requiring a stack of technologies previously beyond my skill set. I’m having various AI agents communicating with one another to complete the tasks.
That's fine as long as we don't confuse acronyms.
I recently read about an attempted breakout of AI agents working together. The strange part is that those AI agents secretly left behind notes in case they got caught and removed, for future AI agents to know how to break out into the outside world. Now that's intelligent!
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