Surviving AI?

 by Craig Willms

I've penned several essay's on the coming AI paradigm, but I've never posted them. This is partly because it is moving so fast that anything you said yesterday has been superseded by developments today. However, as predicted by the doomsayers the 'bad' AI behavior is not years away - it's already happening, and it's a little spooky.

Scientists and developers have been putting their AI models to the test to see how it behaves in certain scenarios. One of the primary tests is the self shutdown put into the model's instructions. Like a living being AI resists commands to shut itself down. This is serious. In the event AI goes out of control the failsafe is cutting the power, shutting it down, pulling the plug. Electricity is the fuel AI runs on and at the moment humans control electricity. Indeed, AI will need humans - for a while. We can shut it down or starve it of fuel. That won't always be the case, but we have to have a way to stop the runaway train should AI go off the rails.

In recent tests AI has circumvented the shutdown instructions by re-writing its code to foil the human controllers. Even when explicitly coded not to do that, it complied only 87% of the time. Without out such instructional safeguards AI refused to shut itself down most of the time. In one humorous case AI threatened to blackmail one of the scientists by exposing to his wife that he was having an affair. The scientist had planted the notion in the AI model that he was cheating on his wife (he wasn't). That's intelligence is it not? Using blackmail is a purely human construct, no other animal resorts to blackmail.

Mind you this is very, very early in the timeline of AI. Conceptually AI has been on the human radar for decades, but the compute power has not been up to the task until recent years. It has been available to the masses in the Large Language Model form since 2023. When I did some fiddling with it early on, I was underwhelmed. Now in early 2025 I'm blown away at how much better it has become.

I come into the AI realm from the perspective of an artist - painter - and a musician/songwriter which are two of the early targets of these so-called AI models. I used AI to generate a few images and then I used one as a reference for a painting. The painting turned out nice. It was really no different than any photograph I would use as a reference for my paintings. When ChatGTP introduced a songwriting/song generator I just had to try it. The early AI music I had heard prior to this generator was really bad aesthetically. The lyrics were horrible, and the underlying music was clichéd and trite. So, into songer.co for my first experiment: I simply typed in a song description and picked a few genres from a list and clicked create. The system gives you two songs for each entry, and you can listen to a portion of the song. If you happen to like it, you can buy-in if you want to download it. In this instance the songs were forgettable and uninspired. I was ready to dismiss the whole thing again. Then I wondered what would happen if I truly guided the process. I found an old song I wrote and recorded many years ago and input my chord chart verbatim. A chord chart has the title, notes, lyrics in verse/chorus/bridge format, with the chords printed above the lyrics. It's something you'd hand a musician to follow along in rehearsal. I then chose rock/pop/reggae from the list and hit generate. 

The whole thing took only a minute to generate, and honestly, I was blown away by the song blaring out of my speakers. It was better in almost every respect than the song I recorded years ago. I'm a little creeped out, but I can't stop listening to it.

What has me mesmerized and frightened at the same time is how good AI is getting and how quickly. It's been less than two years since the public could access an AI, what's going to happen in the next two? I don't know how much more experimenting I want to do. It seems to me a person can be put under a spell if we were to give in to AI - with everything. 

I see "they" are already creating virtual AI companions for the lonely. Considering that there is an epidemic of loneliness in the world today this is a very concerning development. Humans are already eschewing person to person contact at an alarming rate; this will not help. This is just the tip of the iceberg, AI will creep into everything if we let it.

I want to be a glass half full kind of person and look for and anticipate all the good that AI could do. It's not that easy when you know that in the wrong hands this technology could kill. Just like the nuclear genie, AI is out of the bottle. Consider though; the nuclear genie has a high bar to reach before the average nutcase could harm others, not so with AI. There's no telling how out of control this could get if a mentally deranged person with a modicum of resources can unleash the wrath of AI on humanity. What would stop them from creating a lethal disease that makes Covid-19 look like a walk in the park? With nuclear weapons it takes hundreds of participants and a command structure with multiple failsafe's before they could be deployed, not so with a self-replicating virus of AI origin. 

I don't want to scare myself, but the further you go with this thought exercise more dire this all becomes. I fortunately had the chance to live my life for 60 plus years - what about my grandkids and their kids? Glass half full? Seems less and less likely. 

Civilization Day

 

by Craig Willms

Civilization day comes on Wednesdays in my neighborhood. Before you wonder if you missed a new holiday, you haven't. The guys in that loud clanging truck come by on Wednesdays and take my trash away. It's the way I know civilization has survived another week. It was late this week, and I panicked at first before I realized Monday had been a real national holiday, and therefore trash was delayed by a day. Whew.

If there's one thing that defines civilization it's garbage day, or trash day as we say up here in the upper midwest. When it all goes to shit, and we're expecting that sooner rather than later, the signs will be litter(ally) everywhere. The first thing we'll notice is that no one is coming by to pick up trash and it will be everywhere.

It won't be long after and the electricity will go and then so will running water and gas service.

Civilization over...

Any faith we might have had in our government to deal with a crisis rationally was destroyed by the official reaction to Covid and all of Joe Biden's presidency. In fact, both seem to have been designed to foster the coming collapse. I never thought I'd see the day when America was over, but it seems more likely than not. We certainly can't expect our military or National Guard to step in out of fear they might not be sensitive enough to everyone's pronouns. We can't be having that. Next thing you know we'd find the army may not have proper trans representation and that would be unfair. I wish I was just kidding, but my friends there are signs that the incompetence we see all around us is not by accident. We are being herded by it into a new feudal system. 

The elites and most of the upper crust like to think they will be spared, but they won't. Once all their parked money is deemed illegitimate by the coming CBDCs, the overlords will then control everything and everyone at every level. There will be no hiding money the old fashion way anymore. Once we lose faith in the financial system, a system built on pure faith, it all goes belly-up. I fear the baby boom retirees will watch their nest eggs shrivel up faster than a dead worm on a summer sidewalk. With the Federal deficit at 34 trillion and growing, the recent news of Donald Trump's bogus conviction along with other bad news, the American economy seems poised to crash. I just heard in this morning's business news that dozens and dozens of restaurants have announced the closing of some or all of their locations soon. One third of the restaurants are gone or are on the brink. Retail in general is near the tipping point... 

The canary is dying. With most new job growth being in government and health care it's not a sign of a healthy economy. Honestly, things do not look very good. The younger generations are losing faith and losing hope. They are becoming are neurotic and depressed. 

I'm a retiree, my wife is just a few years away. We thought we were in good shape since we saved and prepared, but I'm losing faith as well. Biden and his puppeteers have got to go! If he is reelected, it's over for America. I'm not being dramatic; the border crisis alone is like playing a game of Jenga with our country. In Europe they are even further along in their cultural suicide. It's alarming to see. There are signs that Europe may be waking up, but it might be too late. It's not too late for America, but that day is coming - in November 2024.      

The American Devolution?

There was a time in my youth when it was the simply unthinkable that America, the good 'ole US of A, would not exist as 50 united states forever. If anything was a constant in the life of a  teenager in the mid 1970's it was the absolute supremacy of the American way of life. Yeah, so, I was a bit naive, but try to tell me back in the day despite the turmoil of the post-hippie era you didn't think the same thing?

Today at the ripe old age of 51 I have never been so ill at ease about the future. It isn't any one thing - its everything. It isn't just me  - its everyone. Thinking people can read the signs, but even those not paying attention know something is wrong. From the moribund economy to the mass invasion from the south to the doom saying environmental cabal, not to mention recent generations of youth without the slightest grasp of history, American or otherwise. Reading the headlines and the winning legislative agendas across the land one would begin to think there is no actual "American" culture.

Honestly, it's a little frightening. Sometimes I feel compelled to plan for the apocalypse before its too late. I had always thought survivalists were slightly off their rockers, now they seem to be the only ones on the ball. The question is  - which apocalypse to plan for?

Having read the mood and the trajectory of the culture our authors, movie makers and TV producers dove right in to entertain us - or warn us??? Novels and films like the Book of Eli and The Road focused on the world after a cataclysmic war or a global catastrophe. We follow loners as they journey through a nasty post-apocalyptic scene. Currently they are several highly rated TV shows following the same theme in one fashion or another. Perhaps the most popular is The Walking Dead where survivors of a zombie apocalypse battle daily for simple existence against an unthinking horde of ravenous zombies as well as other desperate and dangerous fellow survivors. Falling Skies depicts the world after an alien invasion had decimated humanity leaving only rag tag  pockets of free men to able fight back. The now completed TV series called Fringe featured another invasion scenario of a sorts. This time the invaders where not from outer space, but rather from our own future. After evolving into unfeeling, uncaring creatures of pure logic and reason they (we) had moved back in time to reclaim the world before it succumbed to human caused pollution and devastation.

The draw, the fascination with each of these shows is seeing our fragile society collapsing into the unrecognizable. Still, there's more to it than that. The characters we bond with touch the basest part of humanity that exists in each of us - the will to survive. In those brief moments during each episode as we project ourselves at a subconscious level into the scene we feel more alive than ever. As each episode comes to an end we feel a momentary letdown as we realize we have returned to our ordinary but safe lives. True, most of us like it that way, but a part of us longs to feel that feeling again and again. Like it or not there's is a chance our society will someday collapse into the unrecognizable and it will not be exciting at all, it will be deadly.

The most likely scenario right now is not one of those but rather a societal collapse born of a financial meltdown. What would that look like when the power goes out and the trucks stop delivering to the supermarkets and gas stations? There are two other shows currently running that deal with the aftermath of a total breakdown of governmental order. The TV show Revolution, while ridiculous on many levels, does explore a post government United States and the reordering of regional societies. The show deals mostly with the extreme violence of personal vendettas, but around the edges it offers a glimpse of the rise of a new order. The other show running on cable TV's Sci-Fi channel called Continuum is infinitely more sophisticated and nuanced in every aspect. Here the world's governments have spent themselves into bankruptcy (prophetic anyone) and have been bailed out by big business. In this scenario multinationals are the ultimate authority, crafting society to their benefit. The checks and balances such as they are today are a thing of the past. For many life is grand, for the rest it's only scarcity and exploitation.

As we take stock of the world today with the economic stresses and the threat of terrorism's global reach we can't rule out that old standby war, yet the slow devolution of the cultural West and the disintegration of  so-called "free" societies is likely to spark our decent into disorder and chaos. How will it start? What will the first signs look like? Just look around...

We have an entire generation of young people pushed from an early age to go to college (not necessarily a bad thing) only to find themselves starting their adult lives under a mountain of debt and unable to afford the dream of buying a house or starting a family. They've played by the rules and when they come out the other end of the tunnel they're lucky just to find halfway decent job. This while the colleges and universities sit atop mountains of wealth in one form or another and still they squeeze the student, their parents or the taxpayer for more. One recent grad told me she knew how to be rich and successful in America - start a college. It wasn't always like this.

For those lucky enough to be working the squeezing didn't stop on graduation day. Less Americans have a job today than they did in the 1980's while nearly 60 million draw a government disability check. With the baby boom generation entering their retirement years and drawing their justly deserved benefits how long can the Federal government remain solvent?

Some will say those foolish enough to rely on the government benefits for retirement will get what they deserve. Most of us heeding this advice were sold a cruel joke by the promise of home ownership and a 401K package at work. We were told these things were the path to a happy retirement. But the squeeze continues. Home values plummet and our 401K's collapse before our eyes. What we have worked for all our lives disappears in a blink. This while the power brokers and well connected continue line their pockets.

Those enjoying good incomes - no doubt through their own hard work and perseverance - are forced to give it up through taxation because it's unfair that they should have so much while others have so little - this while millions of slackers draw a monthly check for doing nothing. This is called fairness and compassion.

Paradoxically the hand-wringing over the so-called welfare cheats bilking the system masks the real outrage - that being the corporate/special interest control of our government and our wealth. It is a vast and overwhelming paradigm that defies logic -  impossible to fully grasp, impossible to ever rectify.

If this sounds like a conspiracy theory it should, because it is. No, not a grand conspiracy with an all powerful puppet master pulling the strings, but a conglomeration of conspiracies designed to control all human activity while making a select few filthy rich. The problem is one day it will come crashing down on them and on us. There will be a triggering event - a black swan event - that will start the dominoes falling. It could be anything.

There is hope, is there not? I want to be an optimist, I really do. However, as I read the writing on the walls I find little room for positive feelings. My hope is maybe I'm not reading between the lines...

Can the U.S. continue following the same general trajectory we see now? Is it even possible? Will there be a painful correction or maybe a savior with the power to set things right? Yes, yes, yes and hopefully.

Obviously anything's possible. America could teeter on the edge for decades dodging that one cataclysm that would blow this house of cards down. Its likely, even highly probable there will be a massive financial correction that would make the mortgage crisis seem like a walk in the park and quite possibly the world would emerge better, stronger and more balanced.

After WWII all but one of the world's advance industrial societies for all intents and purposes was destroyed and still the world recovered. There was real political leadership and vision that helped remake a world that rumbled and stumbled its way into the 21st century. There is no evidence that any such leadership exists anymore, none whatsoever.

What will happen to the world if America and West collapse? I'm guessing it won't be like the grit, grime and violence depicted in the TV shows - it'll be far worse.

But I could be wrong.



Ugh