Once Again, Bernie Is Right!

Once again, Senator Bernie Sanders is right as usual.

He, along with Rep. Greg Casar, have put forth a bill in Congress that would ban tech developers from creating “superintelligent” AI programs capable of surpassing human cognition and resisting human attempts to shut them down. It would also halt any “advanced” AI development until a new federal regulatory body was established to set clear rules and processes for AI safety.  I mean, that is literally common sense to make sure we actually know how to control something like this before it becomes capable of literally outsmarting us all and going rogue in very big way, which is clearly an existential threat to all of humanity.  And 68% of Americans, a solid 2/3 majority, agree with this bill.

We at the TSAP fully support this bill as well.  This needs to pass and be enforced yesterday, if it isn't already too late.  Let's NOT play Russian Roulette with something like this!  The early warning signs are already there, as revealed recently by whistleblowers, as to what can happen if we don't. 

(The late Stephen Hawking already warned us a while back.)

And while we are at it, let's put a national moratorium on large data centers as well, as New York already has done recently.  From the water and electricity hogging to the environmental impacts to the existential risks noted above, these "hyperscale" data centers absolutely need to be paused, ideally indefinitely.

AI can indeed be a blessing or a curse for humanity, depending on who, what, when, where, why, and how it is controlled (or not) by humanity.  We at the TSAP are NOT Luddites by any stretch of the imagination here, but we must acknowledge that this is categorically different from any other technology before it, and the risk is very real.  Who woulda thought that blindly and cavalierly outsourcing and automating the ONE thing that makes us truly human, i.e. the ability to think for ourselves ("I think, therefore I am", as Descartes said), would potentially backfire on us all?  Only anyone with a shred of common sense, that is!

We ignore all of this at our peril!