Artificial Intelligence Moving Faster than Expected By Brian Simpson
I have been watching the evolving debate on the threats of general artificial intelligence. There is the hard core philosophical stuff, beloved of movies of an AI takeover, as in the Terminator movies. But, before all that there is the realistic threat of vast job replacement. Extracted below are accounts of how AI is replacing people left, right and centre. For example, many thought that it would be a long time before AI replaced software workers, hence the mantra, learn coding, usually made by those who cannot code. But a recent experiment showed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is still early days in general AI, can operate an entire software company with minimal human intervention! If AI can do this now, its capacities for job replacement in the future are frightening.
Of course, if there was a social credit economy, we would not be disturbed, but as I have argued, the elites do not intend to offer us that, unless the majority fight for it, but are clearly on the transhuman road to the elimination of the great bulk of us, though the depopulation agenda, as argued by Dr Mercola and Mike Adams. It really is a dystopian battle for existence, but few normies and conservatives have awakened in fright to this yet. But, they will.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/artificial-intelligence-industry-future
“We invented wheels and compasses and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and the eames lounge chair and penicillin and e = mc2 and beer that comes in six-packs and guns and dildos and the Pet Rock and Doggles (eyewear for dogs) and square watermelons. “One small step for man.” We came up with the Lindy Hop and musical toothbrushes and mustard gas and glow-in-the-dark Band-Aids and paper and the microscope and bacon—fucking bacon!—and Christmas. “Ma-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-ko-ssa.” We went to the bottom of the ocean and into orbit. We sucked energy from the sun and fertilizer from the air. “Let there be light.” We created the most amazing pink flamingo lawn ornaments that come in packs of two and only cost $9.99!
In a universe that stretches an estimated 93 billion light-years in diameter with 700 quintillion (7 followed by 20 zeros) planets—here, on this tiny little blue dot we call Earth, one of us created a tool called a spork. The most astounding part is that while that same universe is an estimated 26.7 billion years old, we did everything in just under 6,000 years.
All of this in less than 200 generations of human life.
Now we’ve just created a new machine that is made of billions of microscopic transistors and aluminum and copper wires that zigzag and twist and turn and are interconnected in incomprehensible ways. A machine that is only a few centimeters in width and length.
A little tiny machine that may end up being the last invention humans ever create.
This all stems from an idea conceptualized in the 1940s and finally figured out a few years ago. That could solve all of the world’s problems or destroy every single human on the planet in the snap of a finger—or both. Machines that will potentially answer all of our unanswerable questions: Are we alone in the universe? What is consciousness? Why are we here? Thinking machines that could cure cancer and allow us to live until we’re 150 years old. Maybe even 200. Machines that, some estimate, could take over up to 30 percent of all jobs within the next decade, from stock traders to truck drivers to accountants and telemarketers, lawyers, bookkeepers, and all things creative: actors, writers, musicians, painters. Something that will go to war for us—and likely against us.
Artificial intelligence.
Thinking machines that are being built in a 50-square-mile speck of dirt we call Silicon Valley by a few hundred men (and a handful of women) who write in a language only they and computers can speak. And whether we understand what it is they are doing or not, we are largely left to the whims of their creation. We don’t have a say in the ethics behind their invention. We don’t have a say over whether it should even exist in the first place. “We’re creating God,” one AI engineer working on large language models (LLMs) recently told me. “We’re creating conscious machines.”
Already, we’ve seen creative AIs that can paint and draw in any style imaginable in mere seconds. LLMs can write stories in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Bugs Bunny or the King James Bible while you’re drunk with peanut butter stuck in your mouth. Platforms that can construct haikus or help finish a novel or write a screenplay. We’ve got customizable porn, where you can pick a woman’s breast size or sexual position in any setting—including with you. There’s voice AI software that can take just a few seconds of anyone’s voice and completely re-create an almost indistinguishable replica of them saying something new. There’s AI that can re-create music by your favorite musician. Don’t believe me? Go and listen to “Not” Johnny Cash singing “Barbie Girl,” Freddie Mercury intoning “Thriller,” or Frank Sinatra bellowing “Livin’ on a Prayer” to see just how terrifying all of this is.
Then there’s the new drug discovery. People using AI therapists instead of humans. Others are uploading voicemails from loved ones who have died so they can continue to interact with them by talking to an AI replica of a dead parent or child. There are AI dating apps (yes, you date an AI partner). It’s being used for misinformation in politics already, creating deepfake videos and fake audio recordings. The US military is exploring using AI in warfare—and could eventually create autonomous killer robots. (Nothing to worry about here!) People are discussing using AI to create entirely new species of animals (yes, that’s real) or viruses (also real). Or exploring human characteristics, such as creating a breed of super soldiers who are stronger and have less empathy, all through AI-based genetic engineering.
“It excites me and worries me in equal proportions. The upsides for this are enormous, maybe these systems find cures for diseases, and solutions to problems like poverty and climate change, and those are enormous upsides,” said David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at NYU. “The downsides are humans that are displaced from leading the way, or in the worst case, extinguished entirely, [which] is terrifying.” As one highly researched economist report circulated last month noted, “There is a more than 50-50 chance AI will wipe out all of humanity by the middle of the century.” Max Tegmark, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, predicts a 50 percent chance of demise within the next 100 years. Others don’t put our chances so low. In July, a group of researchers, including experts in nuclear war, bioweapons, AI, and extinction, and a group of “superforecasters”—general-purpose prognosticators—did their own math. The “experts” deduced that there was a 20 percent chance of a catastrophe by 2100 and a 6 percent chance of an extinction-like event from AI, while the superforecasters had a more positive augury of a 9 percent chance of catastrophe and only 1 percent chance we’d be wiped off the planet.
“Artificial-intelligence chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT can operate a software company in a quick, cost-effective manner with minimal human intervention, a new study indicates.
The findings came after researchers published another study in which AI agents powered by large language models were able to run a virtual town on their own.
In the recent paper, a team of researchers from Brown University and multiple Chinese universities conducted an experiment to see whether AI bots powered by a version of ChatGPT's 3.5 model could complete the software-development process without prior training.
To test this, researchers created a hypothetical software-development company named ChatDev. Based on the waterfall model — a sequential approach to creating software — the company was broken down into four stages in chronological order: designing, coding, testing, and documenting.
From there, researchers assigned AI bots specific roles by prompting each one with "vital details" that described the "designated task and roles, communication protocols, termination criteria, and constraints."
Once the researchers gave the AI bots their roles, each bot was allocated to its respective stages. The "CEO" and "CTO" of ChatDev, for instance, worked in the "designing" stage, and the "programmer" and "art designer" performed in the "coding" stage.
During each stage, the AI workers chatted with one another with minimal human input to complete specific parts of the software-development process — from deciding which programming language to use to identifying bugs in the code — until the software was complete.
The researchers ran the experiment across different software scenarios and applied a series of analyses to them to see how long it took ChatDev to complete each type of software and how much each one would cost.
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