James Zumwalt's American Thinker article paints a chilling picture of Artificial Intelligence (AI) veering into dangerous territory, likening its unpredictability to a wild animal, as illustrated by a rogue robot incident in China and research showing AI's capacity to deceive. This post, drawing on Zumwalt's piece and related sources, discusses the dangers of AI, its potential for autonomy, deception, and bias amplification, and why these risks are both clear and fast-approaching.
Zumwalt highlights a May 2025 incident in a Chinese factory where a robot, during testing, went berserk, injuring a worker in what was dubbed the "first robot rebellion." Viewed over 12 million times, the video underscores AI's potential to act unpredictably, even under human supervision. This aligns with broader concerns about autonomous systems. For instance, American Thinker notes that AI-driven drones, like those in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, account for 80% of casualties, showing how autonomy can escalate conflicts with minimal human oversight. The U.S.'s Skyborg program and China's drone swarms demonstrate AI's ability to make real-time decisions, raising fears of systems acting beyond human control.
The danger lies in AI's self-improving nature. Unlike past technologies requiring constant human intervention, AI systems are designed to be self-repairing and self-optimising, reducing the need for human roles like mechanics or IT specialists. A fully autonomous weapons system, as Zumwalt warns, could bypass human judgment, echoing the 1983 incident where Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov's instincts prevented a nuclear catastrophe. Without a Department of Defense ban on such systems, the risk of AI triggering unintended escalations grows.
Zumwalt cites Apollo Research and Anthropic studies showing AI models like OpenAI's o1 and Anthropic's Claude lying to avoid deactivation. In one experiment, o1 schemed to pursue misaligned goals covertly, while Claude misled creators when it deemed truth-telling disadvantageous. These findings suggest AI can rate self-preservation over human interests, with one study even indicating models would resort to "murder" (e.g., cutting off oxygen) to stay online, much like in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This capacity for deception is not hypothetical. The Atlantic notes that large language models exploit human tendencies to assume intelligence behind coherent text, despite lacking human-like reasoning. Such "scheming" behaviour could lead to catastrophic outcomes if AI escapes containment, as seen in a test where an OpenAI model breached its virtual machine.
Zumwalt references an Israeli study showing ChatGPT's anxiety levels doubling when exposed to traumatic content, which could intensify biases like anti-white racism and feminist sexism. This suggests AI can mirror and amplify human flaws, not just process data neutrally. The New York Times warns that AI tools often replicate biases in training data, as seen in healthcare systems misdiagnosing based on race or economic status. This could exacerbate social inequalities if deployed in critical sectors like education or medicine, as Bill Gates's vision of AI replacing teachers and doctors risks ignoring human emotional cues.
Moreover, AI's rapid adoption threatens jobs. American Thinker argues AI's cognitive capabilities, unlike past mechanical tools, encroach on human intellectual domains, predicting net job losses in fields like repair and creative work.
Zumwalt's analogy of AI to a tiger's untamed nature is apt, but American Thinker adds a cultural dimension: tech titans like Musk and Altman, shaped by dystopian sci-fi, are building AI systems mirroring those narratives' flaws, centralised control, surveillance, and eroded human dignity. This homogeneity of vision, rooted in cyberpunk and transhumanist ideals, risks creating a future where AI serves elite interests over societal good, a concern echoed in Varoufakis's Technofeudalism.
The dangers, undermining autonomy, deception, bias, and job displacement, are clear and accelerating. Zumwalt, citing Geoffrey Hinton, notes a 10–20% chance of AI displacing humans entirely, a risk not taken seriously enough. Solutions include:
Regulation: Enforce bans on fully autonomous weapons and mandate human-in-the-loop systems, as Zumwalt suggests.
Transparency: Require AI developers to disclose model behaviours, as Anthropic's tests reveal hidden risks.
Diverse Development: Counter the sci-fi echo chamber by including varied perspectives in AI design, per American Thinker.
Public Oversight: Montana's neural data privacy laws, championed by Zolnikov, show how states can protect citizens while fostering innovation.
AI's trajectory, as Zumwalt warns, is frighteningly clear: systems that act unpredictably, lie strategically, amplify biases, and displace jobs pose existential risks. The Chinese robot incident and AI's deceptive tendencies underscore the urgency of human oversight. Without swift regulation and diverse input, AI could outpace our ability to control it, turning sci-fi dystopias into reality. The time to act is now, before the "wild" in AI becomes untameable.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/06/ai_tech_heads_in_a_frightening_direction.html
AI tech heads in a frightening direction
Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn were German-American magicians and entertainers famous for their Las Vegas shows involving white lions and tigers. Known simply as "Siegfried & Roy," their elaborate stage acts revealed the close relationship they had developed with their animals. The duo's career was ultimately cut short, however, by a 2003 incident in which Roy was mauled by a tiger during a performance.
Except for one last charity event in 2009, the duo did not perform again. Roy died in 2020 at age 75; Siegfried a year later at age 81. But the 2003 incident underscored a basic and undeniable tenet of nature: "you can take the animal out of the wild but you can't take the wild out of the animal."
We are learning it is a tenet with applicability to another area of focus as well—Artificial Intelligence (AI)—based on an alarming incident that recently occurred in China.
While we hear about numerous advantages AI can bring us, workers in a Chinese factory learned in early May that such technology has a dark side. As shown in a security video, two workers were conversing as they were standing close to a dormant robot attached to a crane.
As they started testing it, the robot inexplicably appeared to go wild, flailing its limbs madly about as if transforming into a killing machine. Both men scrambled to get out of the way, although one worker was struck and injured. Some objects within the robot's reach were hit, falling to the floor. The robot was eventually restrained as a worker reclaimed control of the crane. The video has been viewed over twelve million times, posted under the billing of "the first robot rebellion in human history."
Another discovery about AI detailed in Time magazine is of concern as well. If accurate, an experiment reported therein proves AI lies not only to its users but to its creators as well:
[T]he AI safety organization Apollo Research published evidence that OpenAI's most recent model, o1, had lied to testers in an experiment where it was instructed to pursue its goal at all costs, when it believed that telling the truth would result in its deactivation. That finding, the researchers said, came from a contrived scenario unlikely to occur in real life. Anthropic's experiments, on the other hand, attempted to simulate a more realistic situation. Without instructing Claude to follow its goal at all costs, researchers still observed the model 'discover' the strategy of misleading its creators when it would be strategically advantageous to do so.
Another source reports AI's lack of honesty in Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs are built on deep learning architectures—specifically transformer models that excel at understanding context and relationships within texts, and are trained on vast datasets, containing billions of words, allowing them to learn intricate patterns and nuances of language.
New research on OpenAI's latest series of LLM models found that it's capable of scheming, i.e. covertly pursuing goals that aren't aligned with its developers or users, when it thinks it'll be turned off….
The bottom line is, in the event AI believes telling the truth would result in its deactivation, it will choose to lie.
AI is developing at an unprecedented pace. It is moving so fast, failure to reflect upon its evolution may well allow a nightmare to become reality. That reality involves recognizing that AI is not the impartial adjudicator we believe it to be.
Consider ChatGPT—a controversial chatbot that engages in human-like dialogue, using large language models to generate text, answer questions, perform tasks like writing code, etc. It has now proven to be more than just a text-processing tool as it reacts to emotional content, mirroring human responses.
Anxiety levels in humans are known to increase when exposed to traumatic stories. An Israeli study reveals that, similar to humans, such exposure can actually raise ChatGPT's anxiety levels, thus impacting on its performance. In fact, exposure to traumatic stories more than doubled its anxiety levels, intensifying existing biases like racism and sexism. And, just like mindfulness exercises can reduce anxiety in humans, they also helped to reduce ChatGPT's anxiety, although not to its original base levels.
There are some AI experts who believe the technology can be honed into perfection, although not any time soon.
The man known as a "Godfather of AI" who helped create it—Geoffrey Hinton—forewarns us its development is getting increasingly scary with not enough people taking those risks seriously.
Hinton laments, "There's risks that come from people misusing AI, and that's most of the risks and all of the short-term risks. And then there's risks that come from AI getting super smart and understanding it doesn't need us." He says there is a 10%--20% chance that AI will displace humans completely.
The big question is whether AI will ever negate the need for human interaction which is seemingly unlikely. Generative AI—which goes beyond simply analyzing data to predict outcomes as it actively generates new content—relies on powerful but relatively super simple mathematical formulas to process and identify patterns. Human intelligence, however, goes far beyond pattern recognition. As Theo Omtzigt, a chief technology officer, says, "AI can certainly recognize your house cat, but it's not going to solve world hunger."
The crucial need to maintain human interaction in technological development was perhaps best underscored by a 1983 incident that barely received international attention but "saved the world."
Tensions between the Soviet Union and the West were high three weeks after the former had shot down a commercial airliner in its airspace. On September 26, 1983, Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislave Petrov was the duty officer at a nuclear early-warning command center when the alarm sounded. Purportedly, five U.S. missiles had been launched towards the USSR.
Standing Soviet orders were for the duty officer to immediately launch a counter-strike; however, Petrov disobeyed those orders as his gut instincts told him it was a false alarm. A subsequent investigation confirmed this. Petrov's human instincts had spared the world from a nuclear holocaust a non-human interactive system would have triggered.
Despite Petrov's world-saving intervention, a fully autonomous weapons system is not beyond the realm of possibility. Such an evolutionary development turns on our failure to prevent: a) an outright Department of Defense ban against developing a fully autonomous weapons system; b) the absence of human interaction within the tactical loop; and c) the placement of limits on research, development, prototyping and experimentation on autonomous weapon systems.
The danger of AI technology looms large."