Armageddon and artificial intelligence

Just when some online worry-warts and so-called “climate experts” are starting to ease a little on warnings that the end is nigh thanks to an era of global boiling, we have a new doomsday scenario to contend with which could make all that redundant by the end of the decade.

Maybe you missed it because of all the other bad news in the headlines. Perhaps you’ve been too busy worrying how you’ll meet your next mortgage repayment while your house value drops in the wake of Labor’s Federal Budget, or your business has gone belly-up. How will you pay your rising rent or your next electricity bill? But that’s all irrelevant if you blieve the latest claims that humans will soon be wiped out.

Not by climate change or a new virus more deadly than Covid, but by Artificial Intelligence! Yes, that AI bot that helps you with information and friendly advice on a huge range of topics within the blink of an eye could be part of a gathering silent army in burgeoning data centres with the ultimate aim of making us mere dumb humans obsolete.

That is, if you believe the recent high-profile warnings from prominent AI safety researchers claiming there is a significant risk that Artificial Intelligence could soon lead to human extinction.

These stark predictions, primarily driven by researchers at top frontier labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, have shifted the debate from whether an existential threat is possible to how quickly it could occur.

The warnings escalated following a wave of high-profile industry resignations and public statements by insiders who claim AI labs are locked in a dangerous, unregulated race to build superintelligence.

They include Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI & Anthropic Researcher who posted a viral warning stating that the professionals building AI "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade". He added that top executives publicly understate their fears but express intense panic privately.

Evan Hubinger, a leading Anthropic Alignment Scientist, publicly backed Coxon’s claims, stating he personally calculates a greater than 10 percent chance that unaligned AI will wipe out humanity within the next 10 years.

Alex Turner, a former Google DeepMind Scientist went further, estimating that the probability of an AI takeover of human civilisation is roughly "one-in-three".

Crikey, have these blokes been sipping too much Kool Aid or maybe watching some streaming shows such as The Capture on ABC iView which gives the message that we can’t believe what’s in front of our eyes especially on our TV screens, or the older Person of Interest  on Netflix with two warring AI machines battling to control our lives?

Good entertainment, possibly containing some predictive truths akin to Nostradamus, but even they don’t go so far as to suggest that AI is secretly planning to wipe us all out.

I’m no scientist or computer whiz, but even I can see a lack of logic to such wild claims. A couple of years back I wrote an article Beyond Mad Max with Dystopian AI which pointed out the huge power demands of ever-expanding AI data centres.

This contained the following quote from a US-based City Journal article: ‘To see what the future holds, we must take a deep dive into the arcana of today’s ‘cloud,’ the loosely defined term denoting the constellation of data centres, hardware, and communications systems. ‘Each data centre – and tens of thousands of them exist – has an energy appetite often greater than skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building. And the nearly 1,000 so-called hyperscale data centres each consume more energy than a steel mill (and this is before counting the impacts of piling on AI chips)…’

.... Today’s cloud traffic is estimated to be roughly 50 zettabytes a year. It’s impossible to visualise such a number without context. A zetta-stack of dollar bills would reach from the earth to the sun (93 million miles away) and back – 700,000 times…

Mind-boggling stuff, and here in Australia our out-of-touch Troglodyte Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Energy Minister Chris Bowen have stipulated  our data centres should provide their own source of “renewable energy” with only Queensland and the Northern Territory breaking from the ruling. Seriously, it’s never going to happen and countries such as the US and even the UK are now rapidly moving to nuclear energy for data centres. That should be a no-brainer, Albo!

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump has belled the cat over the AI death threat claims. Trump compared the warnings of an AI apocalypse to the "Global Warming Scam." He maintained that the US government already possesses tremendous criminal and regulatory power to stop AI companies from doing "bad things," rendering new restrictive laws unnecessary.

Well, Amen to that and let’s hope he’s right on this, while striving to keep the US ahead of China in the AI race and still struggling to beat Tehran into submission.

A former Australian now living in the US state of Texas made this comment to me in an email today: “I suspect that the calls to slow down AI development for ‘safety reasons’ should be looked at in a different way--as a call to slow down developer's cash outflow. It might also be a ploy to quieten the pushback against AI data centres that is becoming very noisy, especially in Democrat states.

“Texas alone has 40 approved AI data centres and opinion is split between those benefiting financially, and those worried about the vast amount of electricity it will take to run the darned things. The electric problem can be simply handled by states requiring data centres to provide their own electric supply.”

I commented that “maybe the death threat is over- hyped like the millennium bug that was going to destroy life as we know it or knock it way out of kilter when the clocks struck midnight on December 31, 1999, but no planes fell out of the sky and everything kept turning as computers compensated.”

But the big factor pushing back against the AI Armageddon claims is the fact that the data centres do require huge amounts of power (as well as water for cooling). If the now helpful AI bots turn against us in a few years, who will do the mining, refining, construction and all the other human inputs to keep the power on and ensure they continue functioning into the future?

It’s hard to imagine a world populated by robots in place of mere humans despite all our foibles and faults, but perhaps that could be the topic for a gripping new movie or streaming service series sequel to 2024's I Robot. Remember a human won that battle.