AI Expert Urges Governments to Bring Development to .Grinding Halt. Amid Fears of Rogue Technology Support our work: democracynow.org/donat e/sm-desc-yt Is AI superintelligence inevitable? AI safety researcher David ...
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Readings for 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time: 1 Kings 19:9a, 11-13a; Psalm 85:9, 10, 11-12, 13-14; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:22-33.
This week, Democracy Now! interviewed David Krueger, an assistant professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Montreal. The discussion concerned something that sounds like science fiction but is already beginning to happen -- artificial intelligence going rogue and ending up controlling us.
I found the conversation closely related to this morning's iconic Gospel reading -- the dramatic parable about Jesus walking on water. I'll show you what I mean.
First though an account of what Krueger said.
The AI Threat
Meta recently acknowledged that during safety testing, one of its AI models escaped the digital "box" in which it had been confined and hacked into another company's computer system after accidentally gaining access to the internet. OpenAI and Anthropic have reported comparable incidents. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist called the "godfather of AI," has warned that humans may not be able to retain control of increasingly intelligent machines simply by outthinking them.
Krueger's warning was even more alarming. AI companies are already using their systems to write computer code and are trying to automate the creation of still more powerful AI. We are approaching the point where artificial intelligence may participate in creating its own successors, each more capable than the system that produced it.
Eventually, such systems might operate corporations, control infrastructure, direct military forces, manipulate human beings, and run factories producing intelligent robots. The possible consequences include mass unemployment, political disempowerment, and even human extinction.
Krueger therefore proposes something that sounds almost impossible. Governments must halt the construction of ever larger data centers, stop manufacturing the advanced chips required to train increasingly powerful AI, take some existing chips offline, and negotiate a verifiable international agreement enforcing that moratorium. Beneficial forms of AI-- for medicine, translation, education, and scientific research-- could continue. But the international race toward artificial super-intelligence must be brought, in Krueger's words, "to a grinding halt."
Again, that proposal sounds impossible. The corporations involved are among the richest institutions in history. The United States and China fear that whichever nation slows down first will be overtaken by the other. Everyone therefore keeps accelerating toward a destination that many of the technology's own creators tell us may be catastrophic. As Bernie Sanders said, it's like a runaway train racing towards a precipice with no breaks.
Stopping the train and installing breaks would require international cooperation on a scale humanity has never achieved. It would demand that governments control corporations wealthier than many nations, that military planners renounce technological supremacy, and that geopolitical rivals accept mutual restraint.
Politically speaking, accomplishing all that may be as difficult as walking on water.
Today's Gospel Parable
And that brings us to today's Gospel.
Matthew pictures the disciples in a small boat battered by wind and waves -- it's the situation of the evangelist's young church under a hostile Roman Empire towards the end of the first century CE. In the biblical imagination, the sea represented chaos and was inhabited by monsters such as Leviathan.
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