\u2014 from Flagler Live<\/a><\/i><\/b> <\/p>\n As human beings we have always been sitting ducks to extinction\u2019s cosmic whims. We are a few astronomical units away from a life-ending meteor or comet strike, the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs after they were their own animal kingdom for a couple of hundred million years. Nothing we can do about that. <\/p>\n For the brief time human beings have roamed the earth\u2013less than five seconds if earth\u2019s history were a 24-hour clock\u2013we\u2019ve shown nearly equal aptitude and enthusiasm for reproducing, and for suicide. Aptitude for reproduction is nothing special. As Cole Porter put it, birds, bees and even fleas do it<\/a>. But you have to be human to know suicide, by which I mean the act of engaging in knowing self-destruction, as most wars of recorded and (easy to guess) unrecorded history of the last 100,000 years have been.<\/p>\n Those mass suicides have ended tribes, empires and civilizations, but so far not humanity itself. It is only since 1945 that we\u2019ve acquired that skill. A global nuclear war today would end life on the planet, which would become \u201ca republic of insects and grass,\u201d as Jonathan Schell, the Cole Porter of nukes, put it in The Fate of the Earth<\/i><\/a> (1982). <\/p>\n Nuclear war was the top public concern of 1985<\/a>, even ahead of unemployment, which averaged above 6 percent all year. We worried, we debated, and to Gorbachev\u2019s and Reagan\u2019s credit, in that order, we got a start on arms control deals that improved with time, at least until Obama, Trump and Putin decided to bring us back near the brink, where we are now: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists\u2019 famous Doomsday Clock is at 85 seconds to midnight<\/a>, \u201cthe closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history.\u201d Almost half of Americans think a nuclear war is likely in the coming decade, though they don\u2019t seem to be too concerned about it, as if it were something they might still get to watch on TV: This year\u2019s list of top concerns doesn\u2019t even include nukes<\/a>.<\/p>\n Since the 19th century we\u2019d been developing a new method of global suicide, only we didn\u2019t know it until June 23, 1988, when NASA\u2019s James Hansen testified to Congress<\/a> that \u201cthe evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.\u201d The implication was that global warming was a threat, but not yet a life-ending threat. Hansen and other panelists before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee happened to speak on a day when temperatures in the Washington, D.C. area neared 100. He predicted that 1988 would prove to be the warmest year on record. It was, though the record was short-lived, as have near-annual new records since. The panel said the world had, with reasonable and prudent policies, time to respond. <\/p>\n It didn\u2019t. For decades the world has been aiming to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.5 Fahrenheit), above pre-industrial levels, the threshold climate accords had said we cannot safely cross. We will overshoot<\/a> the target by the end of the decade. That\u2019s not bad news just for a few Pacific islanders, but for places like Flagler Beach as seas continue to rise: that extra 10 feet the designers added to the new pier opening in a few months may not look so high in a few decades. <\/p>\n We\u2019ve known since 1988 that warming is an existential threat to humanity. It is now our third means of civilizational suicide. As with wars and nukes, it\u2019s still controllable. The solution has always been in our hands. <\/p>\n We now have yet another existential threat to humanity, and this one, like meteors, may soon be out of our control: artificial intelligence. Unlike meteors, the chances of extinction are not near zero. Anthropic\u2019s Evan Hubinger warns there is a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next ten years if unregulated. You don\u2019t have to be a genius to understand how dangerous and already out of control your peppy AI bots are. If you use anything like Gemini or ChatGPT, you know that they hallucinate and fabricate, they mislead, they get an attitude, and they double down to hide their mistakes. Every day we\u2019re learning of dangerous AI hacking their human creators never anticipated. Let\u2019s hope they don\u2019t know their way to the nuclear codes.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a cynical glibness to how the anxieties are being dismissed as just the latest chicken-little scenario. I was surprised to hear even my usually more prudent colleague Brian McMillan claiming on the radio Friday that he \u201ccan\u2019t tell whether that\u2019s Y2K-scare level or not,\u201d and calling fears an \u201cextrapolation.\u201d I don\u2019t know how a reportedly informed journalist can make that analysis when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last week called for a pause in the technology\u2019s development, as did OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman, SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk, Google DeepMind\u2019s Demis Hassabis. <\/p>\n These men hate each other. They all agree that differences must be set aside to build guardrails\u2013on their business<\/i>. I don\u2019t know that you can point to an instance in American history when the chief executives of their own companies called on regulatory guardrails about their own product, when you could so easily \u201cextrapolate,\u201d to use Brian\u2019s word, from their fears that they don\u2019t trust their own product. Nor do they trust each other to singly address the crisis, knowing what they know of their product and of themselves. <\/p>\n As a New York Times report<\/a> explained it, \u201cA.I. leaders are girding themselves for a day when an A.I. system can rely on itself to grow more advanced rather than requiring the aid of human researchers. This dynamic, which computer scientists call \u2018recursive self improvement,\u2019 is what some top A.I. developers believe may lead to the software spinning out of their control.\u201d<\/p>\n The technology is new. The existential crisis is not. Oppenheimer, Szilard, Bohr, Einstein and many other scientists involved or not in the Manhattan Project that developed the first atom bombs campaigned for guardrails about what they\u2019d wrought, but the company they were working for (Einstein wasn\u2019t) was the American government, and their audience were the American and Soviet public\u2013similar to the AI industry\u2019s audience now. <\/p>\n As a matter of self-defense, AI is the most important scientific, ethical and moral priority of the day. We can leave the ethics and morality of it to philosophers, theologians and academics. The science is our era\u2019s Manhattan Project. As with the Manhattan Project, the only unifying and resource-ready force to build and enforce guardrails and draft other countries to do likewise is not Anthropic or Space X. It is government, guided by reason and the better angels of our history.<\/p>\n Of course I don\u2019t know what the solution is. I don\u2019t think the AI industry knows. Not yet, anyway. This is a collective effort that requires the pooling of unimaginable thought and resources. But we have guides, we have principles. <\/p>\n \u201cEven if the universe should crush him, man would still be nobler than his destroyer because he knows that he dies and he knows the advantage which the universe has over him,\u201d Pascal wrote four centuries ago. \u201cThe universe does not know these things.\u201d Substitute \u201cAI\u201d for the \u201cuniverse,\u201d and Pascal was onto something: \u201cAll our dignity, then, consists in thought. By thought we must raise ourselves, he wrote. \u201cLet us labor, then, to think well: that is the principle of morality.\u201d<\/p>\n We don\u2019t have a solution. But we know the essentials: we know how to get there. The rest is just thought, it\u2019s just raising ourselves. <\/p>\n Instead, we are once again being debased. Donald Trump and his congressional harem now call the AI crisis a hoax. We knew they were immoral. We refused to know they would be suicidal. To his credit, Trump once fast-tracked the Covid vaccine. He has it in him, and could do with AI what he did with the vaccine, at warp speed. Instead, he is slow-walking us to a potential catastrophe as uncontrollable as a nuclear weapon\u2019s chain reaction. <\/p>\n He is our dinosaur in chief, and we\u2019re all sitting ducks. Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive<\/a>, a non-profit news service in Florida. Follow him @PierreTristam<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/flaglerlive.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/dinosaurs-1.jpg\")
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