Joe Allen, author of Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity, said he believes the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will be “utterly miserable.”
Allen, on Tuesday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, explained how AI will most likely not evolve into a full-out “total doom human extinction” model nor into an “elaborate and spectacular” model that provides cures for diseases and invincible security, but instead evolve into something in between.
“Think about the two extremes that you hear in the media. You hear, of course, the doom, and the doom scenario is that artificial intelligence will outstrip human capacities, take control of the digital infrastructure – perhaps by that point there will be plenty of robots and war bots – or maybe it will just kill everybody by turning out the lights. Or maybe it will kill everybody by creating a disease in one of the many bio foundries that are out there. Or maybe it will convince everyone to kill each other by way of deep fakes. That’s the doom scenario,” Allen said.
“On the other side, you have the scenario in which artificial general intelligence, which is above and beyond all human thinking,” Allen continued. “Elon Musk maybe five, six days ago predicted that by [next year], we will see human level artificial intelligence and then by 2029, Five years from now, AI will be smarter than every human being on the planet. So on the positive track, the AI provides radical abundance. It provides all the critical answers to diseases, cancers, genetic disorders, even injuries and aging. It provides for the person who is in control – or the country who’s in control – invincible security. And then, of course, it will allow for human beings to go off to the moon, and then maybe Mars, maybe we’ll find ruins of an ancient civilization on Mars, so that’s the positive side.”
“Now, the bad news is I don’t think that the positive side is going to be quite as elaborate and spectacular as they’re saying, but I guess it’s good news that I also don’t lean towards the total doom human extinction model. It’ll be somewhere in between and it will be utterly miserable,” Allen added.
Allen went on to explain that the evolution of AI is a “matter of taste.”
“I think that what’s going to happen is going to be very much in between and it’s a matter of taste. Taste as to whether it’s going to be pretty fun and pretty wild or. as I think, the preponderance of it will be much of what we’ve already seen out of digital technology which has been to benefit a very small group of people at the top of the pyramid and to at least lure the rest of us into pastimes that are a waste of time but also in many ways these are very sophisticated control mechanisms,” Allen said.
When it comes to developing AI software for the military and wartime, Allen said the U.S. and its contractors are “really out ahead of this,” in regards to AI capabilities of other countries including China and Russia.
“At present, the U.S. defense department and their private contractors are in the lead,” Allen said.
Allen also touched on the unpredictability of AI, explaining how the unknown outcome from the technology is “both the power and the danger.”
“I think some people attribute, I would say, more agency to the AI than is warranted. Like, it’s just coming from out of nowhere, like they just plug it in and it starts doing things. Obviously it’s not that, but the unpredictability is both the power and the danger. It’s because of that non-deterministic programming that the algorithms coming out the other end can be very different with each iteration. That unpredictability is really important,” Allen said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
