More than two-thirds of Americans are worried about the negative effects of artificial intelligence (AI), while 61 percent believe it could “threaten civilization,” according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Whether or not AI will actually threaten the physical wellbeing of humans remains to be seen, but it’s already posing a number of other significant threats.
Read More
Pope Francis is warning about the possible adverse effects of artificial intelligence and the need to monitor the technology in his message for World Day of Peace.
The cautionary message came Tuesday when the Vatican released the theme of the pope’s message for World Day of Peace, which is Sept. 21.
Read More
Does artificial intelligence threaten to conquer humanity? In recent months, the question has leaped from the pages of science fiction novels to the forefront of media and government attention. It’s unclear, however, how many of the discussants understand the implication of that leap.
In the public mind, the threat either focuses narrowly on the inherent confusion of ever-better deep fakes and its consequences for the job market, or points in directions that would make a great movie: What if AI systems decide that they’re superior to humans, seize control, and put genocidal plans into practice? That latter focus is obviously the more compelling of the two.
Read More
Artificial intelligence will not spontaneously erupt into a superintelligence. Not soon, not ever. To understand the absurdity of A.I. becoming a “god,” we need only look at the possibility from the perspective of the A.I. itself.
Let’s start with a reflection on how humans, under God’s guidance, became intelligent in the first place. Over the course of millions of years, ancestors of humans bred in conditions that shaped physical and mental characteristics leading, generally, to the propagation of traits that helped humans survive and reproduce. We must assume, therefore, any A.I. created by man immediately would manifest anthropomorphic qualities that have proven useful for our species.
Read More
Elon Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson Monday that it was “absolutely” possible for artificial intelligence to take control of civilization and make decisions for people.
“That’s real? It is conceivable that AI could take control and reach a point where you couldn’t turn it off and it would be making the decisions for people?” Carlson, a co-founder of the Daily Caller and Daily Caller News Foundation, asked Musk during an interview that aired Monday.
Read More
by Mary Lou Masters Republicans and Democrats are entering an arms race to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in upcoming 2024 campaigns to complete simple, daily tasks previously accomplished by droves of interns, according to The New York Times. Both parties are racing to develop AI technology to carry out…
Read More
If we knew our existence would span millennia, would we be able to cherish each day or try as hard as we do now to leave something behind? Would voices from history still offer urgent advice, telling us we are part of something bigger or to make the most of our short lives so they matter? Would we still reach out to God for inspiration and guidance? If we didn’t have to die would we truly be alive?
When Homer composed the Iliad, it would have been ridiculous to think that someday mortal human beings would invent machines that might wield the power of the gods. But that’s where we’re headed. As economists struggle to imagine economic models that preserve vitality and growth in societies with crashing birth rates, and as individual competence is no longer required by institutions desperate to fill vacancies, artificial intelligence (AI) promises to fill the quantitative and qualitative human void.
Read More
A recently leaked memo from Gen. Mike Minihan, the head of the U.S. Air Mobility Command (AMC), suggested that, within the next two years, the U.S. would be at war with China over Taiwan.
“I hope I am wrong,” wrote the four-star general, before adding that his gut feeling is that “we will fight in 2025.” The leaked memo comes at a time when, according to a recent article in The Economist, tensions between the U.S. and China are at an all-time high — a conclusion amply reinforced by recent headlines about the test of wills between the two nations over a Chinese spy balloon the Pentagon believes was overflying sensitive U.S. military sites.
Read More
Big Tech giant Google on Monday announced Bard, the company’s new artificial intelligence product, in a bid to compete with ChatGPT.
“We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard,” reads a blog post from the company. “And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
Read More
Correspondence from Arizona’s Office of the Attorney General months before the November 2022 general election warned of issues with Maricopa County’s signature verification of mail-in ballots.
The first letter came from Attorney General Mark Brnovich on April 16, 2022, and was directed to Senate President Karen Fann as an interim report of the Maricopa County November 3, 2020, general election.
Read More
In its final canvass report for the 2022 primary election, Maricopa County says it rejected 14 times more signatures than it did in the 2020 general election. This comes on the heels of Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s finding that the county’s standards for signature verification were “insufficient to guard against abuse.”
“Canvass Queen” Liz Harris, so named after conducting an 11-month long independent grassroots audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, told The Arizona Sun Times, “The entire voting system needs an entire overhaul. Period.”
Read More
Maricopa County officials held a press conference and issued a response Wednesday to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s first Interim Report on the 2020 Maricopa County independent ballot audit, prompting a sharp reaction from Brnovich. He said in a letter to supporters, “[T]he Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and County Recorder continue to throw stones at Attorney General Brnovich instead of working to address the serious issues identified in the interim report.” Jen Wright, head of his Elections Integrity Unit, who has lengthy experience investigating voter fraud for the Arizona Republican Party, sent a response back to their attorney with “serious concerns.”
Read More
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued an interim report this past week on his investigation of voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election in Arizona, which found “instances of election fraud by individuals who have been or will be prosecuted for various election crimes,” and a couple of days later he learned some more possibly troubling news. Attorneys for Maricopa County told him ballot tabulators used artificial intelligence to determine whether voters’ ballot affidavit signatures matched their signatures on file.
During an interview with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon on Bannon’s War Room show, Brnovich broke the news. “We got another letter from their lawyer for the first time — and this is not in the report — admitted they are using AI to verify signatures,” he said. “And so the whole signature verification process, is something that I think that, regardless of where you fall on the spectrum, it should be troubling and concerning that they are trying to verify hundreds of thousands of signatures so quickly. And of course that raises the question, how is that even humanly possible?”
Read More
The year is 2022. The place: a New York City so overpopulated that everyone is sleeping and dying on outdoor stairways. All sweating like pigs because of global warming. People have become unwitting cannibals because there is no more food. Elites still dine on delectables, but all that remains for the hoi polloi is the promise of a green wafer allegedly made of plankton, but in reality “It’s PEOPLE!!”
That’s the setting of the over-the-top 1973 movie “Soylent Green,” produced in the wake of Paul Ehrlich’s classic fear porn book The Population Bomb. Time has proven Ehrlich’s predictions of mass starvation due to population growth to be massively wrong. Ehrlich also lost his famous wager with the economist Julian Simon who predicted a more prosperous world. Still, Malthusian propaganda dies hard because it’s such an effective tool for social engineering.
“Soylent Green” is a random example, chosen because its year 2022 happens to be upon us. Certainly, dates and science used in science fiction have a heavy emphasis on fiction. The “Blade Runner” rebellion of genetically designed replicants was set in 2019. And, of course, Big Brother ruled in George Orwell’s 1984. Though much has come to pass, including genetic engineering and the surveillance state, there’s proof enough that we can’t predict the future with certainty.
Read More
Chinese scientists reportedly developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program capable of filing criminal charges.
The AI “prosecutor” is given a verbal definition of a case and then decides whether to file charges, according to the South China Morning Post, citing researchers involved in developing the program. The prosecutor files charges with a 97% accuracy rate, and is intended to reduce prosecutors’ workload.
“The system can replace prosecutors in the decision-making process to a certain extent,” said Shi Yong, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ big data and knowledge management laboratory that developed the program.
Read More