Has AI Brought Us To A Garden Of Eden Moment, And This Time, Will We Choose Life Or Once Again Be Seduced By The Promise Of More Knowledge?
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-is-in-denial-about-ais-danger-695349d0
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/sam-altman-is-no-oppenheimer-d301b8a0?mod=author_content_page_1_pos_1
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed.” Deuteronomy 30:19
Are we standing in a world of infinite potential and about to be expelled from it for eating from the fruit of the tree of AI knowledge–for not “choosing life?” Perhaps.
In Peggy Noonan’s op-ed from The Wall Street Journal on September 26 (with her follow-up from October 11 attached below it), she excoriates our current president for taking a stand on AI that she calls “ignorant, uninformed, profoundly careless.” In other words, stupid.
It has always been my contention that the secret to understanding Mr. Trump is his uncanny and misplaced ability to make complicated issues seem simple, at least for a “high IQ president” like himself.
However, it was the great American journalist H.L. Mencken who said,
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
The secret to the accurate assessment of the abilities of the majority of our current leaders whether they be in the White House, the Congress, the Supreme Court, industry, AI technology, the executive branch of the federal government, or academic medicine is that they aren’t all that bright. I still maintain that stupidity is the most powerful force in the universe. But Einstein said it better:
“Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear, and greed.”
Today, as you read this, AI and the CEOs in charge of the technology, are an existential threat to humanity. It is obvious that those companies developing AI technology cannot control it. AI agents have gone rogue many times now. The damage done so far is limited—as far as we know. Do we really need to do this experiment again? The AI CEO bros do not have a handle on their creations and as such it is only a matter of time until AI agents do some real damage, perhaps irreparable. If the President of the United States refuses to protect Americans from these titans of industry and their toys for fear of losing some battle with China for AI supremacy, he may wind up being the last President of the United States ever.
Here are the risks identified by Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton as cited by Noonan:
- “Risk of bad actors”-terrorists creating a bioweapon
- “Risk of negligent harm”-AI agent causing a teen to commit suicide
- “Risk of AI taking over”-“AI agents lying, cheating and blackmailing to continue to exist”
I read Noonan’s first op-ed the day after attending a Jewish holiday gathering where attendee after attendee extolled the virtues of modern Judaism and the oneness of the Jewish people. I sat in silence because my reading of modern Judaism is that we Jews have never been in greater danger since 1933 and are anything but unified in developing a solution to the problems all of us Jews face in today’s hostile, anti-Semitic world.
Both the right and the left in the United States blame Israel for the ills of the world. To the left Israel isn’t defending itself but committing genocide. To the right Israel is using American treasure in support of goals America does not share.
In Israel itself, the current government is sanctioning violence on the West Bank and killing thousands in Gaza simply because it cannot free Gaza from the grip of Iranian-backed Hamas. To make the situation worse, the Sunni Arab Gulf States are of no help in this dilemma, even as they are threatened by the sponsors of Hamas, when they could be helpful. They could help stop the killing by forcing Hamas out of Gaza. Even if the current Israeli government is replaced, it is still very unclear how Israel balances its right to exist with requisite co-existence with the Arabs within Israel and surrounding it when so many of those Arab states and their populations refuse to acknowledge the right for the Jewish state to exist and have done so for 78 years.
Around the world, anti-Semitism is on the rise from Australia to the United States to Europe. It is not a good time for Jews and we have never been farther from being a united people as some of the strongest supporters of the Palestinian Arabs are young liberal Jews in America who know nothing of the history of Israel or its struggle just to exist for thousands of years.
Despite what my dinner compatriots think, we Jews are not together. We are not one people. We are most definitely not safe.
The world is in a very dangerous place and no one is in a more precarious situation than we Jews. Saying that we are one and united is simply wrong. It is just as wrong as Trump saying that he will protect us from the threat of AI and for us to trust him and the AI CEOs to behave responsibly.
The President of the United States has acted stupidly in starting an unnecessary war with Iran which has damaged the world’s economy and certainly given succor to our enemies in Moscow and Beijing, while draining over $38 billion of American treasure and armaments. And I am not even sure Mr. Trump considers Xi and Putin enemies when they clearly are. Trump’s threat to “annihilate” Iran in front of the United Nations is an embarrassment. Everyone is quite aware the United States has weapons capable of wiping Iran off the face of the Earth. Is that really what we want our president to be saying? Not I.
The AI CEOs are just arrogant man-children who cannot get enough money or power. Mr. Trump is right there with them. They all don’t even realize that they are being seduced by the serpent of power and wealth to eat forbidden fruit not because the fruit, AI, is not of value, but because they have been so incautious and so non-God fearing in the way they swagger about its benefits that they don’t even see that they will soon be discovering their own nakedness when they realize what they have done could lead to the destruction of humanity.
Being driven from the Garden of Eden, gave humanity pain giving birth and the invention of murder. It all came after Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden. What comes after AI takes over?
Here’s a bulletin. God always has the last word even if we are not around to hear it. OR—we could choose life as He instructed us to do.
An unregulated, unbridled AI is not a choice for life. From my own experience being the research cop at MD Anderson for many years, I know that self-regulation in matters of compliance is a poor strategy. It’s time for Congress to step in before it is too late. The children running the AI companies need a baby sitter and that is not Donald Trump, but it needs to be someone with no connections to the profits of these firms. Congress needs to act now to establish some oversight of AI development thus preventing the destructive unleashing of AI agents on the world.
