Since Donald Trump announced at the United Nations that he wants to rebrand “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence,” I wanted to give some important background for how we got here.
Trump said:
From this point forward, all of the United States documents and hopefully the world will be changed to use the much more accurate term “super” as opposed to artificial. So, it’s “super intelligence”. In other words, welcome to the new world of “super intelligence” “SI”.
Let’s see if that sounds much better. It is much better and it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon. “Super intelligence” every major new technology brings challenges and “super intelligence” is no exception.
There is nothing new about the idea of “superintelligence.” In 1965, I.J. Good, a Bayesian statistician and a colleague of Alan Turing, the father of computer science, wrote “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine.”
Good warned that such a machine might not be “docile,” yet asserted that the “survival of man” depends on building it. Good predicted it would happen “within 30 years.”
28 years after Good published his paper, in 1993, there were two other papers which extended Good’s ideas, despite his prediction falling short: Science fiction author Vernor Vinge’s “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” and Nick Land’s “Machinic Desire.”
Vinge presaged much of the current mythology around “superhumanly intelligent” machines, popularized the concept of the “technological singularity,” and predicted it would happen—in about thirty years.
At the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), Nick Land said that capitalism is a kind autonomous artificial intelligence sent back from the future to consume humanity. He tied AI and capitalism together in a kind of inevitable doom spiral.
Nick Land went on to co-found the neo-Nazi movement Dark Enlightenment with Curtis Yarvin, based in large part on the ideas of Peter Thiel.
In 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote the book “The Singularity Is Near” which gave an optimistic outlook and predicted it would happen, you guessed it, in about thirty years. The same year, Peter Thiel met a man named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who would go on to become the guru of doomer AI. In 2006, Thiel, Kurzweil, and Yudkowsky started the Singularity Summit devoted to promoting a future where machines will either merge with us—or kill us all.
Thiel has been infatuated with apocalypse for decades, but at TedX Silicon Valley in 2009 he gave away his strategy. He listed seven potential “disasters” that could end civilization:
Robots kill humanity—“Skynet.”
Pandemic wrecks civilization.
Runaway nanotechnology—“gray goo” destroys the planet.
Existing technology runs away—nuclear war.
Computer-enabled totalitarianism—a one-world government uses computers to control everybody.
Global warming wrecks civilization.
Nothing happens—technological progress stalls.
The punchline of Thiel’s talk was that #7 was the real danger—that nothing happens. He sees “technological stagnation” as the greatest threat. That’s why Thiel has done everything in his power to enable the other six disasters, especially #1—“Skynet.”
That same year, 2009, Thiel wrote that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel’s agenda is clearly to destroy the West, so he can rule over the ashes.
It was Thiel’s money and validation that nearly single-handedly launched the abusive Effective Altruism apocalypse cult that runs the AI industry. Thiel is the one who constructed an alternate reality around AI. Thiel stands to make tens of billions of dollars from AI IPOs.
But in the real world, it’s all just science fiction designed to con people into appeasing a dangerous, failing industry out of fear. These machines aren’t “intelligent” at all, much less more intelligent than humans. Chatbots are neither a savior or a boogeyman. They’re just another way for billionaires to take your money.
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