Is it too late to bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) to a screeching halt, before we are all unemployed or are wiped out by our new masters?

It is not merely a matter of slowing things down until we can get a handle on AI that is going to get smarter than us. What’s at stake is our existence as a species, not whether AI uses too much electricity or water.

The AI question kinda snuck up on me, which is embarrassing for a sci-fi uber geek like myself.  My history is punctuated by the book and movie “2001,” where the awake computer Hal kills one astronaut and defies the other. I’ve seen all six of the Terminator movies where humanity fights Skynet, an AI that decided it didn’t want or need to have us around. I understand the machine war/Butlerian Jihad in the Dune series and have wondered what if Mike, the conscious computer in Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” hadn’t made friends with three humans and just got pissed at humanity? Then what?

The more I look into this AI puzzle, the more alarmed I become, recently hitting hair-on-fire status.

I place no faith in the tech bros or politicians who can’t say what AI will do for us, but are quite willing to invest hundreds of billions in computer centers and block federal regulations, all in the name of competition with the Chinese. 

I see the Internet getting swamped by AI “slop,” images, and headlines that are not real, but are terrifically effective at arousing hate, fear, or lust in viewers.

And I see alarms from the top scientists and inventors of AI, that no one really understands what AI is doing or becoming and the risk is too great to let it run on willy-nilly. Experiments show AI is now sufficiently complex that researchers studying large language models consider them as “nonverbal minds” or “alien intelligences,” when trying to analyze how AI solves problems. AI is utterly new and much of it is unknown.

I am fairly confident that AI will never resort to nuclear attack or robot armies to get rid of humanity. Too wasteful. Instead, imagine a super-infectious, fatal disease (and vaccine) genetically designed by AI and released into the population with surgical precision. No enemies or potential foes left alive and only willing partners/slaves in the world.

Just last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a bill to create a moratorium on AI data centers until strong national safeguards are in place. The bill would also ban export of AI chips, computers or programs to countries without robust safeguards.

Is it enough? I don’t know. Neither does anyone else.