I’ve spent the last few weeks doing a deep dive on where we are with AI in this country, and let me tell you, it’s troubling.
Yesterday, a couple of higher ups at AI companies stated they believe that we have now reached AGI levels of intelligence.
AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence and this basically means that these companies think that artificial intelligence has reached the same level of intelligence as a human. Obviously a computer has been better than humans at some areas of intelligence - chess, Go, mathematical computations, etc. but this means that they believe that AI can think on its own and develop its own intelligence without human code and human prompts.
There are many ramifications for this “achievement”, with only a couple scenarios that are ok for humanity’s flourishing and or survival.
I’ll dig deeper into this issue on my blog next week.
However, one thing that can help stem the tide of AI is to hold the politicians accountable for allowing this to happen. Every incumbent Republican needs to answer to the public as to why they voted for the big beautiful bill. Part of this bill cut some funding to Medicare. People lost coverage. Drug prices skyrocketed. Rural hospitals closed. But some of this tax money went to building data centers.
Data centers has one of the lowest approval of anything right now among the general public, with a dismal 20 percent approval. People would rather have nuclear energy sites, prisons and methadone clinics in their communities over data centers. We as a public need to band together on this non partisan issue and demand some things of these AI companies:
- the energy consumption of data centers needs to be paid by the company, not by the community.
- The cooling of these data centers needs to be done by a different way than using water.
- these data centers should not be given tax breaks and the taxes should go towards the community they are located in to improve schools, roads, etc.
- the AI companies need to be more transparent about the situation. They also need to put in kill switches so that if AI becomes too powerful and begins to devise ways to overcome humanity, it can be turned off.
- the global community at large needs to address this issue and come up with regulations on a global level. This would eliminate the reason that companies give for not being regulated: “if we don’t build it, China will.”
Again, more coming from me soon but this is the issue that has me more worried than anything right now. Below is an interesting YouTube video about 10 possible outcomes of AI.
