Fake experts, media hysteria and the same old agenda;
-- Daniel Greenfield/Sultan Knish
There are plenty of good reasons to be concerned about AI: destroying jobs, dumbing down students and the spectacle of people copying and pasting chatbot answers instead of doing their own research. We are looking at the very real possibility that the next generation will primarily relate to the internet, interact socially. and gain information, through AI.
And then there’s the anti-AI op being run by shady groups with prior involvement in ‘disinformation’ speech censorship and climate hysteria, using alarmism to push a deal with Communist China that would impose a global government and eliminate our freedoms.
The op kicked off in D.C. 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. The professors had been involved in China’s AI governance.
This was followed by a recent ‘Pro-Human Assembly’ featuring such luminaries as Sanders, teachers’ union boss Randi Weingarten, actress Ashley Judd, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Stephen Bannon under the apparent 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.
Anyone who remembers past deals with China or arms deals with the USSR knows, such a deal would be completely worthless, would be violated by China, and would be used to cripple us.
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)” to push its agenda of a China AI treaty.
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 powerful, and would have control over America, but obviously not over China.
A world government for dangerous AI applications sounds like the worst possible idea ever.
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.” The latter means a renewed push for internet censorship through a vastly “powerful” global organization with governmental powers.
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 so they don’t know they’re losing their rights.
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 popped up after President Trump’s win 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.
And some of the organizations advancing anti-AI hysteria were involved with environmentalism and disinformation. We’re told to listen because otherwise the world will end. Sound familiar?
“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 they used during the Cold War and for environmentalism is being dusted off all over again.
Who are the ‘experts’ behind the anti-AI campaign warning us of doom?
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 at all 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.
How did the switch from rat birth control to banning AI happen?
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.’”
And she took it.
The former grad student is now all over the media and social media while tweeting that “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.” This is the shrill and unserious state of the movement.
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.
That’s because there are no specifics worth destroying our freedom and national independence.
Actual dangers from AI can be regulated the way we regulate all other products. The anti-AI movement is hyping SciFi intangibles about a superintelligence while using as its example chatbots that have trouble understanding simple commands. They’re seizing a narrow window in which they can frighten us, wield power over us and impose their system on us. And their agenda is about a whole lot more than AI. It’s “extensible” to our entire lives.
AI is not a threat, except in the wrong hands, people looking to control us are the real threat.
Read next: With Every Sunrise Comes A Reassuring Reminder That It Is God--Not Government--Who Rules The World
Email Us | Reader Friendly | Comments
