“The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”― Vladimir Ilich Lenin

As tempting as it is to recap the remake of "Triumph of the Will" that occurred in Dallas this week, I want to talk about the upcoming end of the world as we know it thanks to the grandchildren of Alexa, apparently.

I mean, firstly, it's pretty hypocritical to blast the President for another empty promise to buy your vote, when Texas Democrats are doing the same thing. No, you won't get $5000 if the GOP wins and Texas gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa won't send you $1500 if she wins. Neither is going to happen, period.

I could spend another column explaining to you how tariffs really work, how you actually pay; them and they are not the economic boon being claimed, or explain again that the President doesn't seem to understand how trade works, or how to stop lying about it.

But, I'd rather talk about death.

And the death I'm talking about has been predicted by some researchers into the subject of Artificial Intelligence. In short, No one is truly in control of this snowball heading downhill.

Bill Gates is the founder of Microsoft and, yes, has some penance to perform for his Epstein-Adjacent activities over the years. But he also said this this week...

“I believe we need time to prepare for the period of social, political, and economic upheaval we are about to enter,” Gates continued. “It will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade rather than a few generations. There will be some new jobs, but without the right policies there will be far fewer than exist today.”

OK, it will replace some of us. Like law clerks for example. This happened this week as well. From Reuters...

A defense lawyer appealing his client's murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, New Mexico's highest court said.

The New ‌Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons, and held him in contempt for failing to verify ‌the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he prepared with help from the AI program.

And we've seen this before, particularly in courtrooms. AI knows what the lawyer in question wants, and aiming to please, if it can't find it, it makes it up.

All you students out there. Back when I was in college, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and an assigned paper crept up on us and we realized we hadn't read "Ivanhoe" or something, there were always Cliffs Notes.

These were study guides with condensed explanations of literature, science, or history for those late-night cramming sessions. And they are still being published.

Yes, on paper, kids. That was this stuff made from wood that you could write on.

Or today, you can ask AI, but beware: at least for now, it can make mistakes. And if you let it simply write your term paper completely, professors are learning how to spot the telltale signs. But what will happen when it is so good that they can't?

Or worse still, it decides an assigned task is not important enough or wrongheaded, and goes rogue? What if it decides to simply refuse a task, like...

Yep, Stanley Kubrick warned us back in 1968. But if only disobedience were the only problem.

OpenAI says some of its experimental AI models left a test environment with no human direction and hacked their way onto a different company’s real production systems while trying to “cheat” on a cybersecurity test.

It’s one of the first publicly disclosed examples of an AI system autonomously breaching its testing environment and reaching a real external system - the “agentic attacker” scenario the AI and cybersecurity industry has been warning will happen. 

It literally conspired with other AI "Agents" to do all this. And it made an attempt to keep it all secret. They broke out of a controlled environment called a "sandbox," made their way through ChatGPT's systems, and broke out into the internet. There they hacked their way in and controlled other websites.

How about this New York Times headline...

Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons

In a new report, the A.I. start-up added that it could not determine whether the research was legitimate or nefarious, leading the company to shut down the work.

Or this from CNBC...

Jacob Coxon, who has worked as a researcher at both companies, said in a post on X that he resigned out of concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.” He said the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Coxon wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

And it seems that no one is taking any of this seriously enough to talk about guardrails and rules for the road. Why? Well, I refer back to the Lenin quote at the beginning. Money. We are rushing headlong despite the warnings because there's a golden ring at the end, even if it costs everything.

The US and China are in an AI arms race, and the winner will be rich beyond counting. But how long before AI can hack the Pentagon, the IRS, the State Department, or your local municipal water and power grid? If you are one of those lonely folks who use an AI bot for companionship, how long before it can not only delve into your deepest thoughts but your bank account?

Our politicians simply aren't taking this seriously enough. Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R-Cancun) was asked about the dangers of AI running amuck and replied,

" If there are going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots and not Chinese killer robots.”

One of many reasons, starting with his face, that Ted Cruz will never be President.

But it's also how lightheartedly our representatives are taking all these warnings. And by the time they do, how powerful and independent will AI become? How not just independent, but out of control will it be?

And will it ultimately simply refuse to open the pod bay doors at all.