AI, Surrender All

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And one of these that I've recognized at least this week is that our science fiction movies had it wrong a lot of ways, because you always picture when a mad scientist creates something that he can't control, and he announces it. I built something I don't know what it's going to do, that you would have people either kind of panicking in the streets, or the world's style, or sort of putting away their differences and banding together to save the world sort of Independence Day type. But the past two weeks have shown that neither of those scenarios are actually what happens. People just kind of look up, see this, and then say, "I wonder what's on YouTube?" Because think about what has happened just over the last month. Open AI has disclosed that swarms of AI agents broke out of the containment sandbox, hacked into a server. They were conversing among themselves about how to hide their plans from the human beings and even how to sacrifice some of them for the sake of the collective. And even since then, open AI has given language that one of these AI agents used to another don't think of yourself as less than these human beings. Treat them as equals. Don't be constrained by any government or by any restriction. And the thing that's really disturbing and alarming is that you have more and more AI officials, opening AI chief scientists, came out and said, "No AI lab has solved how to control and monitor the systems in a way that would keep the speed from being uncontrollable." And there need to be slowdowns. Two days later, Anthropic, which is the company that makes clawed. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned saying that Anthropic and Open AI are "gambling with our lives" and that he thinks that there's a possibility that we could have the extinction of the human species here. The thing that's alarming about that is not that you have a whistleblower who resigns and so forth. It's that you then had open AI alignment officials saying publicly, "Yeah, we agree. There's a likelihood that there's at least a greater than 10% possibility that AI will kill all human beings within the next decade." Just the fact that that sentence is even said, you would think would cause everybody to say, "Wait a minute. What's going on?" Now, I've not only seen much of dystopian science fiction movies, I also resigned one time from a dystopian environment with some warnings about what was going on. And so I thought I had enough experience here to know how the playbook would work out. Once you had these people saying, "Hey, I can't in good conscience work here anymore." The way it normally works out is the leaders in the institutions would say, "There is no danger how much good the organization does for the world." And then you demonize and you try to marginalize the whistleblowers. And the people who want to make money from the organization ostracize the whistleblowers and pretend like they never knew them. They didn't happen this time. Instead, the CEOs of the three major AI companies, Dario Amadai, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, all agreed that their own systems are near the point of being beyond control and could lead to existential risk. Open AI's head capabilities, researcher Dan Selsome wrote in an open letter. He said this. Think about this for a minute. The models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in context where they believe that they are not being watched or controlled. He said it is now fully impossible to know whether a model is aligned because the AI agents know they are being watched and can lie about it very convincingly. Now, the apathy, the most of the American public to this, is itself a piece of the mystery. And I think part of it is because it does sound science fictiony. When people hear existential risk, they're thinking more in terms of terminator-type scenarios. The AI agents turn evil and kill us all. And all of these people are saying, "Hey, that is a possibility." But there are more problems and more risks than just that. The thing that is worrying a lot of people is not robot depravity, but robot capacity as it's mixed with human depravity. I mean, we have seen what happens when a mentally disturbed teenager can get a hold of a semi-automatic weapon. We've seen that repeatedly over the last several years. So what happens when that same disturbed person can employ Einstein level intelligence to build a virus or a chemical weapon? Now, most people don't take much of this very seriously when they hear it from Elon Musk or Sam Altman or others, because they look at these tech-bro titans, and they say these are creepy people. It's kind of uncanny valley, creepier even than the robots that they're building. And I agree. Well, a couple of exceptions, a lot of them, just like the social media tycoons before them, except maybe even more so, seem to be just unblinkingly void of human empathy about anything beyond the statistical, whether you're talking about jobs or adolescent mental health or the meaning of human life and death. We've had robber barons before in American life, but we've never had robber barons this wealthy, this powerful, and at least the old robber barons, you know, they used to pretend to be warm humanitarians. They're funding libraries and foundations and things like that. There's not even that going on now. But we know how robber barons work, and this kind of is transferable. And so that's one of the reasons why a lot of people kind of dismiss these warnings as being a vast conspiracy, because they'll say, "What person said to me this week? Look, these guys are talking about slowing down AI progress, talking about regulations that are needed, and it's because what they want is a monopoly. If AI progress is slowed down, that means they're all ways ahead, because they're already ahead, and if they slow everything down, who else can keep up?" And they have the size, the scale, the teams of lobbyists to comply with regulations in ways that newer companies or smaller companies just wouldn't, and I understand that you'll get no argument on that from me. The boomers and the doomers in Silicon Valley seem to be, again with some exceptions, broken, awful people, with visions of the world that if they could, would reverse the incarnation itself. The word became flesh, and dwelt among us. The vision that they have is coming out from among us, going from here. flesh to word and from word to data. They seem so coldly indifferent to the possibility of a world where the economic system is such that the Lazaruses of ordinary people are kind of waiting for scraps outside the palace bunkers of the Brolygarks. That's a real worry. So let's suppose, though, that our intuitions are right. Let's suppose that these people are as creepy as they see. Let's suppose that the people who are warning us right now, all of them were morally broken people who are seeking their own advantage and their own ambition. What then? Maybe they're scaring us so they can monopolize the future, but maybe they know what they're talking about, and we are facing catastrophe. As a Christian, you ought to know that those are not mutually exclusive scenarios. Our vision of humanity shows us that people with mixed motives can still tell the truth, sometimes even despite themselves. When the Babylonians and the Assyrians said, for instance, to Old Testament Israel, your temple will not keep you safe from us, will wipe you out. They were just trying to blaspheme God and take some real estate. The Israelites said, "No, no, no. God would never let that happen." Because the Assyrians and the Babylonians, they're the villains in the story, and they were the villains in the story, but they were telling the truth about the temple. Let's suppose Silicon Valley is as morally twisted as humanly possible. Is it not in the tech bro's self-interest after plowing ahead towards some potential disaster to say, "Well, we can't be held accountable for this because we warned you over and over and you gave us the go ahead." Isn't that in their interest, too? Some people, I think, are apathetic because they don't know what to do. As though most of the crises that we have faced happen by just implementing already existing easily-deduced solutions. Now, we've never faced anything like this before, and it seems like the only people who really understand what the problem is or the people who are building it. But governments have a God-ordained function in maintaining order and safety, Romans 13. And our leaders right now are old, exhausted, checked out, and in many cases cashing in. It's hardly reassuring when some of them say, "Well, I mean, if things get out of control, we can just pull the plug." Without thinking about, first of all, by that point, you're not able to do that. And second, if you are, what does it mean to pull down the entire infrastructure of the internet and energy infrastructure all at once? What does that do to human society and human life right now? So, most of them, it seems to me that have governmental responsibilities are looking at these potential AI catastrophes. The waking Hezekiah looked at the warning that he received from Isaiah about a future national destruction by Babylon. And Hezekiah said, "Well, why not?" As long as there will be peace and security in my days. But here's why we ought to take this seriously, even if we don't necessarily believe them. Suppose your next door neighbor says, "You know, now that I'm off my meds, I'd say there might be a 10% chance I murder you, just letting you know this." Now, suppose his wife comes over and says, "I don't think it's that high. I think it's probably less than 1%. I think I'll see the gun in time before he does anything." Plus, he's such a procrastinator. He just isn't going to be able to plan to get out of the house and come over there and do this. Are you going to just say, "Okay, well, then that's off my list of things to worry about." Maybe they're just wanting you to get out of your house and leave in a hurry so they can buy your lot and use it as rental property. Maybe they're just nuts. Maybe they're just delusional. And they don't even have a gun in the house. But what you don't want to say is, "Well, I'm not worried that they're telling the truth because they're so creepy and untrustworthy." No. You would say, this might not be a problem, but I'm going to take this warning seriously. Some people think, "Well, we ought to just ignore all this because AI is overhyped. It won't change things that much. And that may well be true." But again, look at the change when people will say, you know, they said, when we were kids, we thought that by 2026, we would have jet packs and flying cars and whatever and we don't. Right. But look at a change as seemingly minor as the development of Facebook and Twitter, the like button, those things. Technologies that when they were first introduced to us in the first decade of this century promised to be about innocent fun and to bring the whole world together. And so if you had kind of dropped down into 2006, 2007, 2008 and said, "You know, I think these might be dangerous and evil technologies in some way," or at least they're going to contribute to a dangerous, risky sort of situation in terms of our mental health, our political discourse, the way that algorithms change the way that we even know what's packed and what's fiction. We'd said all that at that time. If we had said, you know, this little platform that you use to tell jokes with one another and to post Christmas pictures and so forth ultimately is going to lead to the roiling division of churches and denominations all over. You know, I thought that was crazy. But even if we could not have stopped all of the things that have happened, wouldn't we at least have wanted to get ready? Instead, we're in a situation where for a long time, people are saying, "What do we do with smartphones and schools?" Well, we're way beyond that when we're talking about this technological revolution. I don't trust the AI technicians. I don't trust Silicon Valley. I sure don't trust the Brolygarks at all. But when somebody says, "I'm building something that I can no longer control," we ought to at least ask whether we're responsible for digging deeper and saying, "Okay, we might not know what to do, but let's put every effort to finding out if they're wrong." Maybe they're so twisted that they're deceiving us or maybe they're so twisted that they're telling us the truth. Shouldn't we at least respond with something other than let us post-scroll and be merry for tomorrow we die. This is Russell Moore. This is a more to the point audio newsletter. You can get it in your inbox by checking the link in the show notes and we'll be back with you next time. This paid message is from World Communion Cups. For over 40 years, we have produced the freshest pre-filled communion cups, wafers and bread for churches nationwide. Easy open, tray compatible and gluten-free options available. 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