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!

Two Minutes To Midnight (Iron Maiden)

Now that the Doomsday Clock is now officially at 85 seconds to midnight (!) as of January 27, 2026, I felt that this famous 1984 classic rock song by Iron Maiden is rather appropriate at this moment in history:

Stephen Hawking Warned Us About It. We Need To Listen Yesterday!

Years ago when he was still alive, the late genius theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking made a terrifying prediction, namely that the prospect of uncontrolled superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) is at least as much of an existential threat to humanity as climate change.  And that really says something!

Alas, we still don't seem to be listening, let alone heeding his wise advice.  There is no way to sugar coat this hard-to-swallow pill.  If AI grows any more powerful than it currently is (that is, more powerful than GPT-4) before we learn how to fully control it, and it becomes uncontrollable, it would truly be an existential threat to humanity, civilization, and planet Earth (and possibly even beyond).  Not just in the distant future, but also sooner than one may think, at the rate things are currently going.  Even as a best case scenario, uncontrolled AI would make literally every single current problem in the world far worse before it would make it better.  I repeat, that's the best we could hope for, and it goes downhill from there.  I mean, once the genie is out of the bottle, it's not like anyone would be able to, you know, outsmart it any longer if it ultimately becomes orders of magnitude smarter than even Stephen Hawking himself.

The TSAP thus supports recent calls to put a minimum six month global moratorium on any further AI development beyond GPT-4, period, no exceptions.  And ideally, this moratorium would be indefinite, but six months would still buy us time.  THIS is what things like the precautionary principle and Pascal's Wager were literally designed for.  That is, we would be in a far less precarious position (by orders of magnitude) if we "overreact" and shut it down yesterday, than we would if we were to foolishly let AI get out of control and it becomes too late to control it.  There is literally no comparison between the two.

We ignore such risks at our peril.  Don't say we didn't warn you!