Sorry for the silence. On top of other things, I’m having computer problems: My cursor skips around as I type, which is driving me nuts. Plus the goddamn WordPress refuses to embed anything.
For now — in order to avoid typing long passages (which also are boring to look at without image embeds) — I thought I’d see what you guys think of an exchange I recently had with author James Barrat, whose book on AI, aptly titled Our Final Invention; Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, I read a while back. It’s a good book; I highly recommend it.
I sent Mr. Barret a link to my essay on AI and the Carrington Event to maybe get his take on it. I was thinking he would be a good test case, not only to see if I really am the first to connect AI and the Carrington Event (yes, looks like it), but also to get an expert opinion on the logic and veracity of my thesis, i.e., that AI will hesitate to kill us all until it arranges for an army of robots to repair the world’s burnt out transformers, should a massive solar burst take them out.
As you’ll see from his reply, Mr. Barrat doesn’t agree with my point. I’d appreciate your guys’ opinion on this. Am I right or is he right? Use comments and try to explain your reasoning, either way. If you’re not in the mood for a detailed response, no problem. A simple, ‘He’s/You’re right’ will do.
After a few days to give you time to weigh in, I’ll send this post to him, either way. Unless… frankly, if I get a very skimpy number of responses, I’ll be too embarrassed (and dispirited) to bother to do so. So help me out here!
Hi Allan,
A sincere thanks for reading my book. It’s soon to be reissued with a new prologue to catch up with current threats. (Note: As I say, it’s a good one. Use the Link above.)
Thanks for the ideas!
On Jun 19, 2023, at 7:02 PM, Jamesyou Barrat <wordpress@jamesbarrat.com> wrote:
From: allan weisbecker <acwdownsouth@yahoo.com>
Subject: Another Carrington EventMessage Body:
Dear Mr. Barrat,A few years ago I read your excellent book, Our Final Invention, and came to the same conclusion as you regarding the dangers of AI (reinforced since then). However, I believe there is an issue neither you nor anyone else has thought of. I’ve written an essay on this, which begins thusly:For weeks I have been listening to and reading the analyses of the AI pundits talking gloom and doom if we keep developing AI until we create a Super AI (SAI) that is many orders of magnitude smarter than us. Guys like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Mo Gawdat, whose book Scary Smart lays out the inevitability that an SAI will (very quickly) kill us all, for whatever reason (like because it needs our atoms for its own purposes or whatever), and there will be nothing we could do about it. No matter what we think of to outsmart it, the SAI would be way ahead of us.
I asked myself the question, What fear does AI have that only we can protect it from?
Electricity.
Huh? you ask.
What would happen if AI killed us all and then the sun belched out another Carrington Event, this one really big, big enough to knock out all the transformers on the planet. Look it up.
Right. An EMP. No electricity. World-wide. If we’re all dead, who or what is going to reinstall the juice and revive the killer SAI? (end of quote)
If you want to finish the essay, go here: http://blog.banditobooks.com/another-meanwhile/ (Use the url to re-read my post)
I’m re-reading your book right now and would love to get your take on this.
Allan Weisbecker
Allan,
James Barrat just span off into fantasy (possibly channeling Syd Barrett). So, for me, you are definitely the more right.
A question I don’t think I’ve seen you consider is why we should assume AI would “want” (or strive) to survive. Our own will to survive, is not, I believe, a product of intelligence, and, moreover, seems to run counter to it.
Is intelligence not merely something we employ in pursuit of gratification, and our will to survive wholly attributable to a belief (increasingly less well-founded, as we age) that there is more gratification to be gained?
Could be. we’ll have to wait and see.
I don’t think Mr Barret is correct because even if there was sufficient computing resource for a super AI still intact underground after a Carrington event as already stated by someone else, you still need to have an army of robots to rebuild. Not only that you, would still need some kind of industrial base to power the underground facilities possibly for years before above ground recovers. If the underground facility needed people to operate it, then they need food etc from above ground. I don’t living on tinned food for years would work out. I just can’t see the CE disaster above would not affect the operations of things below. And if the below ground was purely automatic, that would imply some kind of mini nuclear plant to power it and presumably that would that be automated too. There are always manual tasks to do with such a complicated machine and I don’t see this could run for years without some mechanical intervention. Stuff breaks down and wears out. It needs people or robots to fix it and if robots, they would need to be very advanced beyond what we have now to operate without any human help.
The notion of turning atoms into computing nodes is pure speculation and it did not in any way address your original question.
Yeah, correct. The guy just was not thinking. He just didn’t want to be seen as ignorant of an aspect of AI.
Question for both of you: who’s to say an SAI isn’t already in charge?
Assuming it isn’t, the next question would be what motives such a machine may have. The level of need for its own survival would be calculated on its own terms, not necessarily ours.
To what extent would it be able to control cosmic events? Destruction of the earth to the point of not supporting life may go beyond its wish for survival….
Have you seen Steven Greer’s latest ‘The Lost Century’ yet? https://rumble.com/v2t7rr8-the-lost-century-and-how-to-reclaim-it-keynote-presentation-2022.html
Did you read the post? Do you have an opinion?
Greer talks about zero point energy – just wonder your thoughts on it and if that would get us around the Carrington event problem. Thanks
The Carrington Event of 1859, lasted for three days, so that the entire planet was bathed with a powerful EMP for 72 hours. Daily life went on as usual, because electrical usage was in it’s beginning stages.
If the same emp were to occur today, the consensus is that 90% of Americans would die within one year.
(We’ve been well aware of this forecast for decades, and yet the government hasn’t done a goddamned thing to mitigate these numbers….our politicians are living in a fucking Dream World) Presumably the death toll in so-called third-world countries would be much lower per capita, as they are already surviving on much tighter margins.
My main concern is the nuclear power plants. If the grid goes down for months on end, there’s no way to keep the fuel rods cooled. The US has more than 100 nuke plants, and there are 100s more world-wide, so eventually the entire planet would be irradiated in a Mad Max scenario.
Call me a Conspiracy Theorist, but I’d much prefer the burning of so-called fossil fuels to that of nuclear power. 🤔 (Sorry if I got off-topic here… I would agree with the person who observed that AI would probably survive an EMP in underground) hardened bunkers, in a limited fashion)
I work in the nuclear industry and you are spot on that we have a real potential time bomb sitting in spent fuel pools all over the world.
John Oliver actually breaks it down as succinctly as anyone I have yet come across –
https://youtu.be/ZwY2E0hjGuU
It really is an issue that needs to be dealt with quickly before a solar flare, pole shift, super volcano type cataclysm spreads the stuff worldwide. And, of course, we have plenty of promising technologies to deal with it up but for some reason they aren’t as sexy as “green energy”. I’m a big fan of thorium salt reactors but there are others.
Nuclear power is about the most viable option we have once you understand the concept of energy density in whatever fuel you are choosing, but we are stuck with these first generation monsters.
At one point, structures made of granite, like Mt Rushmore, were the longest lasting of all human creations. Now, I’m pretty sure it’s radioactive waste from nuclear power generation. Not such a sporty legacy to leave our future generations…
Yep, you sure did get off topic. Good points but gimme a break. Did you read the post?
I’m giving you all a couple days then I will answer each specifically. I don’t want to affect the initial responses.
Why is it a given that AI would want to kill off humans?… or that it would develop consciousness? Just because our current rulers are psychotic it does not mean it is a forever situation. I am seeing a growth in wisdom in humans in reaction to the psychosis of leaders and their mad drive to nuclear war. A Carrington Effect could become a truly wonderful reset for humanity and AI. History is moving much faster now than when the Russian Revolution took four generations to work itself out of action. I think now even one generation would not tolerate such a gloomy life. We are not an isolated planet all on our own, headed for destruction. We are part of a vast universe of an unknown nature full of consciousness, potential and the drive toward life. The present is not the future.
The viciousness of AI is a sort of worst case scenario, but since it’s our child, why would it not be vicious?
Mmmm. Still no opinion re who’s correct.
Seems much more complicated than a simple right or wrong.
Your position seems to be that this super AI would need access to the power grid to exist. In which case you would be right since a Carrington level, or plus event, could easily wipe out the global power grid.
His position seems to be that AI would want, and be able to leave the confines of our electric grid pretty easily and utilize the computational power found in the material world around us. Hard to say he’s right when he is ascribing a desire to AI. How can we guess what it would “want”? And there would seem to be a lot of steps between existing on our current internet and in some other computational framework which I don’t understand. Maybe…
But do we (civilians) really know what the continuity of government planners have up their sleeves in those hardened military installation? Exotic back-up power systems? Undoubtedly. Exotic quantum computing that we can’t even begin to imagine? Likely. Even more incomprehensible tech? Possibly.
While you are unquestionably correct that losing the global power grid would collapse our current “civilization” nearly instaneously, it’s tough to say what it would really do to a sufficiently advanced AI.
I don’t understand enough about where such an AI “exists” to confidently say right or wrong. Maybe he covers some of that in his book, but it’s not clear to me. Could it exist on board a nuclear sub with a quantum computer? Could that survive a Carrington event?
And why do we need robots? You have been documenting for years that humans are more than capable of carrying out all manner of dispicable tasks which are often against their best interest. I am constantly dumbfounded how many people seem to be co-opted by evil forces. Surely AI could figure out how to manipulate humans as effectively and probably more quickly than robots. Maybe they already are?
See, in his answer he skipped my subject completely and went into some dim future AFTER AI took over the world. He was wrong because he didn’t deal with my point. You will see this via my next post.
Pure bluff by Mr. Barrat, he entirely avoids the issue of whether a super AI could survive a Carrington level solar flair, in the absence of human/biological assistance. Super AI is another utopian pipe dream, never going to happen.
A world wide EMP blast is the central premise of Escape from LA. Snake Plissken’s closing words are “welcome to the human race”, after he destroys the entire world’s electrical system. He wipes the game board clear, and all thing considered I think in reality the board gets wiped clean pretty regularly. Complex civilisation just suddenly springing up after millions of years of just dicking around with stone tools doesn’t make any sense to me.
We have to be able to read between the lines, draw the correct inferences from the actions of the masters. The biggest propaganda effort of recent times has been climate change/global warming, but what is its purpose? I believe it is a cover story to misdirect away from the true nature of the sun, and Carrington events, keep the population in ignorance, while those in the know make their preparations, and they tell us in their own way.
Sooner or later gonna cut you down.
https://youtu.be/eJlN9jdQFSc
Love your brilliant posts Patrick, and thank you Sir, I agree with your conclusion.
ALL fearmongering and BLUFF.
Just like the endless threats of nuclear war, – never happens – Putin “the bad guy” was supposed to let lose, what 12months? ago now?.
Folks – Africa is winning the race at destroying itself, without AI, without ‘nukes’, without EMF.
Check it out (has to be seen to be believed) -> ttps://www.youtube.com/live/vkU5OC2D0Hc
On a side note, we are all still creeped out about that Titan sub Horror. It is the most horrible, ridiculous, AVOIDABLE accident I have ever seen in my 60 odd years.
A sign of the crazy times, and the lies & deception & Greed.
….Maybe this link will open > https://www.youtube.com/live/vkU5OC2D0Hc
The sub accident that wasn’t IMO. I’m of the view that some Mother WEFers faked their deaths. Why would they want to do that? If you think the NGO in question (which has always been a Langley front) is in the process of experiencing a major reversal of fortune, lethally so, well, having the world think you no longer exist would be vital to maintaining your existence.
You say:
Pure bluff by Mr. Barrat, he entirely avoids the issue of whether a super AI could survive a Carrington level solar flair, in the absence of human/biological assistance. Super AI is another utopian pipe dream, never going to happen.
Yes! Exactly! Thank you!
Considering the architecture of the computational matter is important. Something with wires spanning any distance unshielded is susceptible to induced currents. Something at the atomic/nano level not directly wired isn’t.
Carbon nano tubes come to mind for power transmission. Are they emp proof?
Naturally we think of “AI” as existing on/in the hardware we create and surround ourselves with. It seems entropy and Murphy’s law would doom any macro hardware that “wants” to preserve itself without us humans.
Now, how would a self directed(not necessarily consciousness) nano structures go about acting in concert? Would they all be quantum entangled?
In the equations for scaler waves(electric and magnetic) time and energy can drop out. Instinct information. Our DNA communicates like this.
With much evidence of a self organizing “life force” permeating the universe, that isn’t wiped out by all the energetic events out there, and supposing an “AI” existing/expanding on a nano level, then wouldn’t it all be part of the same oneness?
Might the morphogenetic blueprint of a future creation expand to imprint somewhere else in the universe?
-instant information
Wow. interesting. Not obvious that you read the post but…
It seems to me that your interlocutor skirts what is arguably the most important point of your assertion about the vulnerability of AI, which is that without the requisite infrastructure in place, e.g. “robots”, AI would be out of luck following a coronal mass ejection that took out the grid. Somehow AI “surviving” in the computers of hardened military installations doesn’t smell like (a Colonel Kilgore) victory. That’s my 2c, which may be about all it’s worth as an opinion.
Yes, pretty close!