by Jim Rickards, Daily Reckoning:
As you know, artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. From a market perspective, it’s certainly taken on bubble dynamics.
And I believe leading AI chipmaker Nvidia is about to get hammered, which could trigger a much broader market crash beginning tomorrow afternoon, shortly after 4 p.m.
But from a broader AI perspective, the news is full of stories about how machines with vast computing power and blinding processing speeds, given access to billions of books and documents and the ability to teach themselves, are poised to take over the world.
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Is it true? I’ve been studying AI and its potential for years, so I have a deeper understanding of AI than the average talking head.
I’ve actually spent time visiting with the world’s third-fastest non-government supercomputer (the HiPerGator AI computer at the University of Florida) as part of a project to apply generalized superintelligence and AI to national security tasks.
So how advanced is AI getting? How close is it to approaching a rough parity with human intelligence? And what dangers does it pose to humanity?
We Can Just Pull the Plug — for Now at Least
Experimenters now envision machines taking on a life of their own and attacking humans and civilization. But it’s important to remember that if the machine goes berserk, you can just pull the plug.
Apologists for AI capacity claim that pulling the plug won’t work because the AI will anticipate that strategy and “export” itself to another machine in a catch-me-if-you-can scenario where disabling one location won’t stop the code and algorithms from popping up elsewhere and continuing to attack.
Maybe. But there are all kinds of logistical problems with this, including the availability of enough machines with the processing power needed, the fact that alternate machines are likely to be surrounded by firewalls and digital moats and a host of configuration and interoperability issues.
So for now, you can just pull the plug. In fact, there are a number of safeguards being proposed to limit the potential damage of AI while still harnessing its enormous benefits.
This isn’t a technical article, but these safeguards include transparency (so that third parties can identify flaws), oversight, a weakened form of adversarial training (so the machine can solve problems without plotting against us in its spare time), approval-based modification (the machine has to “ask permission” before activating autonomous machine learning), recursive reward modeling (the machine only moves in certain directions where it gets a “pat on the head” from humans) and other similar tools.
Of course, none of these safeguards works if the power behind AI is malignant and actually wants to destroy mankind. This would be like putting atomic weapons in the hands of a desperate Adolf Hitler. We know what would have happened next.
James Bond With AI
The solution in that case would be more political, forensic and defense oriented. Intelligence gathering would play a huge role. Of course, that evolves quickly into a machine-versus-machine intelligence war of collection and deception.
Imagine James Bond with a hyper-computer instead of a Walther PPK. AI’s more immediate threat is less serious, but nonetheless disturbing, especially for investors.
Investors need to be careful about relying on GPT systems for financial advice, despite their enormous processing power. The output is never better than the inputs and the market inputs are littered with bad models, false assumptions, poor forecasting records and biases.
Garbage in, garbage out.
AI is already being programmed with woke ideology, for example. You probably recall Google’s ridiculous Gemini AI-backed image generator that depicted Black Vikings, female popes and other absurd images. You can imagine the dystopian future that a woke superintelligence could create.
A Woke 1984
You’re probably familiar with George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; (it’s often published as 1984). It was written in 1948; the title comes from reversing the last two digits in 1948.
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