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This article is taken from the August-September 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now were offering five issues for just 10.

Does AI pose a mass extinction threat? Or is this concern merely the latest manifestation of humanitys need to frighten itself witless?

As the year 2000 approached the world fretted over the Y2K or Millennium Bug. Neurotics and newspapers alike predicted that power plants, banks and planes would fail as 1999 became 2000, ushering in pandemonium and death. John Hamre, the US Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1997 to March 2000, foresaw that the Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Nio and there will be nasty surprises around the globe. There werent and there was little difference in the outcome between countries which invested millions of dollars and countries which invested none.

In the 23 years since then, weve gone from computers are so stupid the world will end to computers are so clever the world will end. But the hysteria remains the same.

The latest apocalyptic horror on the heels of Covid-19 and climate catastrophe is whether, non-human minds as Elon Musk pitches it, might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us. He co-signed an open letter with other tech leaders warning that machines might flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth (in contradistinction to humans doing so).

The letter set out profound risks to society, humanity and democracy, which in turn led to a multitude of hyperbolic headlines such as the BBCs Artificial intelligence could lead to extinction, experts warn. The Centre for AI safety warned starkly that: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

AI does pose threats, as well as tremendous opportunities, but the threats may be quite different to the doom and gloom headlines. First, there is no certainty that AI will develop the capabilities that we are being extravagantly warned about. Even the Future of Life Institute which published the open letter admits that super-intelligence is not necessarily inevitable.

Thus far, AI has had a free ride on human achievement and creativity. There is no AI without humans. There is no generative language AI without human language. There is no writing in the style of John Donne, without John Donne. In fact, ChatGPT and Bard do a terrible impersonation of metaphysical poetry, although their limericks are passable. There is no AI art, music, novels without everything that has gone before. In short, the achievements are still ours.

The panic is focused on what might be. AI is an extremely advanced tool, but it is just a tool. It is the humans holding the tools with whom we need to concern ourselves. New technology has sometimes resulted in some horrible uses, such as the gas chambers. New communications technologies have been channels for propaganda. But they were not the propaganda itself. Nevertheless, some threats are real.

Firstly, AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks. IBMs CEO, Arvind Krishna, recently told Bloomberg that he could easily see 30 per cent of jobs getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period. And according to a report by Goldman Sachs, AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs.

It turns out the very IT, software, media, creative and legal people now worried about AI, might find themselves facing increased competition from AI. For example, Chat GPT will help people with average writing skills produce better articles, which will probably lead to more competition and lower wages.

AI is also a brainwashers dream. Advocates for regulation want you to think that AI is about to discover sentience and write new religious tomes, invent propaganda and disrupt elections, all because it wants to, for its own devious reasons. In fact, the brainwashing threat is quite different.

AI can be sedimented with psychological techniques such as nudging. Nudging involves influencing your behaviour by altering the environment, or choice architecture, in different ways, by exploiting our natural cognitive biases. Algorithmic nudging is a potentially potent tool in the hands of paternalistic libertarian do-gooders or authoritarians.

Nudges will be able to scale completely unlike the real world counterpart, and at the same time be completely personalised. Facebook knows you better than anyone, except your spouse, from a mere 200 likes splattered on its pages, even to the extent of knowing your sexuality. As I warn in my book Free Your Mind, if you dont want AI to know you better than anyone else, tread lightly on social media and use it mindfully.

It is interesting that the threat of AI is likened to nukes, yet the academics have been writing for years about algorithmic nudging which presents clear ethical dilemmas about consent, privacy and manipulation, without clamouring for regulation.

Algorithms already create completely personalised platforms

Algorithms already create completely personalised platforms. Twitter is often described as a public square, but it more closely resembles a maze, in which the lights are off and the walls move, seemingly arbitrarily. Aside from the disturbing evidence presented in the release of the Twitter Files particularly concerning how Twitter deamplifies content it does not like, anyone using the platform a lot will attest to the inexplicable rise and fall of follower counts and the suppression of juicy tweets. It seems content is pushed up or down based on the preferences of Big Tech and government agencies, and this is made effective through the capabilities of algorithms. AI is killing transparency and pluralism.

In our relationship with AI, our biases create danger. The authority bias means we see AI as more powerful than it is, and therefore we are more likely to succumb to manufactured and exaggerated fears. We anthropomorphise AI. Google engineer, Blake Lemoine was prepared to lose his job because he believed LaMDA, an AI chatbot, has sentience.

AI is not human-like, but it is our human tendency to believe it is so. One study has shown that since lockdown, people show a higher preference for anthropomorphised brands and platforms. The more we disconnect from each other, through tech, the more we want tech to resemble us. Men already have AI girlfriends and one Belgian man was persuaded to kill himself by an AI chatbot called Eliza after he shared his fears about climate change. Alarming though this is, is it any more so than a technological upgrade of last years sex dolls or emo music?

AI might make us stupid. As we rely even more on our phone our own capabilities may decrease. One study has shown that just having your phone nearby reduces cognitive abilities. As we outsource homework, research and even parts of our jobs, will we use our brains to create more wonders of the world, or to vegetate longer on TikTok?

Our biases make us vulnerable to the perceived threats of AI

Our biases make us vulnerable to the perceived threats of AI, but so do the times in which we find ourselves. We no longer seem to have sufficient collective belief in our special status as human beings. Another co-signatory of the open letter is the historian and author Yuval Noah Harari who has described humans as hackable animals. If you see humans as soulless organic algorithms then you might indeed feel threatened by AI which certainly constitutes superior algorithms unconstrained by mortal flesh.

Harari believes that humans will no longer be autonomous entities directed by the stories the narrating self invents. Instead they will be integral parts of a huge global network. This is a far-reaching hypothesis, and perhaps why Harari does not own a smartphone, for all his apparent enthusiasm for a transhumanist chipped-brain future.

He has claimed that AI may even try to write the worlds next Bible. Humans are quite capable of starting religious wars on their own. So far all AI has managed is to show the Pope in a white puffer jacket.

Hararis dire warnings keep him in the spotlight as a forward-looking muse to the worlds elite. After all, describing AI as merely an intelligent system which, for now, can write a passable undergrad-level essay doesnt seem epoch-defining. Equally, those calling for regulation potentially stand to benefit from investment, government contracts and control over the desired direction of regulation.

Casting AI as a god is indicative of our tendency to fear the End of Days, combined with a crisis of confidence in ourselves and an overdeveloped authority bias. AI is no god, it is a fleet of angels, poised to swoop and intervene in the lives of humans at the bidding of the priest caste who direct it.

It is the priest caste we should look to. What do the tech leaders and politicians of the world want? They dont want to stop AI altogether, of course. They want to pause development and the release of updates while they work together to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems. They want a seat at the table to write a new moral code.

As a priority, they want the right sort of people academics, politicians and tech leaders to be doing this. Comparing AI to nukes rather than explaining its nudging capabilities is all you need to know about the transparency of the regulation, and the sort of safety it aims to achieve.

Whether AI is viewed as an intelligent assistant or angel, it is in the employ of humans.

Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist itwritten by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan is out now (Harper Collins) from all good book shops.

Read more here:

AI: is the end nigh? | Laura Dodsworth - The Critic

Alfa Romeo is inching closer to the debut of its first supercar in more than 16 years. The model will be unveiled at the end of this month. But before that happens, the Italian carmaker is making a suggestion to enthusiasts: to imagine it with the help of artificial intelligence.

Modesty has never been a virtue for Alfa Romeo. So they come up with a proposition: enthusiasts should imagine what they call "the most beautiful car in the world" using artificial intelligence. That is the tag that Jeremy Clarkson used for the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione during BBCs Top Gear, but the carmaker hopes to switch crowns.

And we do know that the 8C, revealed at the Mondial de l'Automobile back in 2006, is going to be a muse for the upcoming supercar in terms of design. And so will the legendary T33 Stradale from the 1960s.

Alfa Romeo confirms that the supercar will be unveiled on August 31. They describe it as a creation which was "born through the courage and passion of a team striving to make a dream become reality."

Photo: Alfa Romeo

Will it look futuristic or nostalgic? they ask. Classic or contemporary? 4 or 2 doors? Sleek or steampunk? Red or green? No, they are not looking for design inspiration with just one week left to the official presentation. The move is just part of the buildup ahead of the event scheduled to happen next week. The best submissions will be shared on Alfas Instagram account.

The limited-run model does have a name, but that is classified information as well. It should reportedly be called either the 6C or 333. The 6 would be a reference to the twin-turbo 2.9-liter V6, which should be integrated in a Formula One-inspired drivetrain. Meanwhile, the 333 would be a hint to the iconic T33 Stradale from more than half a century ago. Alfa Romeo will only build 333 examples of its super-exclusive supercar.

The carmaker has great expectations regarding the first supercar that they roll out in more than a decade and a half. Alfas CEO, Jean Philippe Imparato, said that the model would be sold out by the time he actually unveiled it. And it would happen he explained because it would beiconic and super sexy.

No word on any reservations just yet, though. We are to find out more next week, during the premiere that will be streamed live from the Alfa Romeo Museum in Arese, Italy.

Excerpt from:

"Most Beautiful Car in the World" Alfa Romeo Asks People To ... - autoevolution

On Tuesday 8 August Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity in the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales, addressed the Institute on the lessons Australia and the international community need to learn about global health and biotechnology from the Covid pandemic. Professor MacIntyre drew on the research onthe prevention and control of infectious diseases explored in her book Dark Winter: An Insiders Guide to Pandemics and Biosecurity (NewSouth Press, November 2022).

Professor MacIntyre opened with an alarming anecdote: an illegal lab owned by Prestige Biotech was discovered in Fresno, California, in March 2023 containing genetically-engineered mice. These mice were humanised modified to replicate human responses to pathogens and could spread COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2, the herpes virus, HIV and other diseases dangerous to humans. The lab was located 35 kilometres away from a naval base and had links to China, but nobody appeared to be alive to the implications of this discovery: there are huge gaps in the awareness of biosecurity issues among law enforcement, intelligence and military agencies.

A US congressional hearing had received testimony that the COVID-19 pandemic had been the result of a lab leak in Wuhan, a lab that had received funding from the United States. In response to a question from the audience as to what might motivate two notorious rivals like China and the United States to participate in joint research efforts in this way, Professor MacIntyre suggested that one possible reason could be that certain forms of research could only take place in certain settings, and in certain countries.She was open to the idea that COVID-19 could have originated from an accidental, or even deliberate, leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She stated that this is not a right-wing conspiracy, but a plausible hypothesis.

Open-source methods are now available to manufacture synthetic biological weapons cheaply. Dual-use technology technology that can be applied for good or bad increases the risk of man-made pandemics. These unnatural diseases carry much greater risks than naturally-occurring pandemics. In Professor MacIntyres view, biological warfare is the next arms race, as nation-states seek to create new weapons to combat potential threats to their national security. She drew the audiences attention to the retention of the smallpox virus by the former Cold War superpowers, Russia and the US. In theory, the virus is retained for research purposes, but the possession of the smallpox virus seems likely to be for possible biological warfare. She had scrutinised the availability of formulas for deadly pathogens on the internet: the omnipresence of these formulas meant that anyone with the requisite training and equipment could create a pathogen for a biological weapon. For example, she claimed that a Canadian scientific team had easily recreated the horsepox virus a cousin of smallpox in 2017 by using publicly available research.

Next, Professor MacIntyre turned to the potential for engineering human embryos. While the World Health Organisation (WHO) has made attempts to regulate genetic engineering experiments involving humans, she believed certain governments and organisations have continued to undertake research in engineering superhumans. She called for governments to agree on principles to strictly regulate the development of such technology, in order to prevent adverse global impacts.The United Kingdom and the United States are among countries that have been conducting research on the creation of super soldiers which Professor MacIntyre warns has the potential to become a future arms race. The objective is to create soldiers who are stronger, fitter and with greater stamina and resistance to pain by conferring changes to the human genome. She warned that hostile states may in future find a way to alter the genome of vulnerable target peoples.

Professor MacIntyre drew parallels between the future of pandemics and climate change: although governments have had a vested interest against combatting global heating, it is public awareness of the phenomenon and its effects that will truly make a difference. Current regulation of biotechnology is heavily driven by the need to protect the interests of research scientists, and community awareness and engagement have been very low. But the solutions to the existential crisis posed by man-made pandemics will have to come from the community, empowered with the requisite knowledge and given a voice.The public need to seek information and press governments to respond to threats. The final chapter of Professor MacIntyres book is entitled A biological winter, alluding to an existential threat to humanity comparable to threat of a nuclear winter.

Professor MacIntyre commented on the declining compliance with established research ethics principles, such as the need for individual consent and the do no harm rule, largely borne out of the Helsinki Declaration and the Nuremberg trials. She argued that research committees have failed to consider the effect of research on people in other countries. For this reason she strongly advocates the registration of all clinical trials.

In response to a question from the audience on what the World Health Organisation (WHO) is doing to address the threat posed by man-made pandemics, Professor MacIntyre acknowledged that the WHO has assembled an advisory body, the Scientific Advisory Group for Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), to investigate the origins of new epidemics, natural or otherwise, and also participates in pathogen projects. But arguably it is not doing enough to educate and inform the public especially given its vested interest in managing the expectations of donor states. Asked whether the WHO is the right organisation to address the risk of future pandemics, she responded that solutions to the problems she outlined earlier would likely stem from interdisciplinary approaches, models and training which would prevent inter-organisational conflicts and increase the ability to work collaboratively. She also touched on the work of Biosafety Now, a US-based non-governmental organisation aiming through regulation to increase the accountability of those who wish to conduct these controversial forms of research.

Responding to a query about the risk of the long-eradicated smallpox virus re-emerging as a epidemic in the future, given that stocks of the virus are held in the US and elsewhere, Professor MacIntyre acknowledged that melting Siberian permafrost has been said to increase the risk of a natural epidemic re-occurring, but considered it likely that future smallpox epidemics will be driven by man-made variants.

Asked about the status of future pandemic planning and vaccine development efforts, Professor MacIntyre discussed the work done by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to create vaccine equity around the world and Australias efforts to expand its Intensive Care Unit (ICU) capacity by 120%. She also discussed EPIWATCH, an AI-based system which taps into open-source data to detect the early warning signals of an epidemic well before any health department in the world and aims to stop the spread before it crosses international borders.

Another audience member commented that they could not understand the scale of rejection against the notion that the COVID-19 virus had been made in a lab when this was a well-known practice of governments in the past, citing the example of the development of the anthrax virus by the UK government decades earlier. Professor MacIntyre responded that the difference can be explained by the post-cold war era we live in now. The development of anthrax during the cold war appeared to face less resistance when it was part of an overt arms race. Although it is arguable that the same practices persist today, they are far more covert.

Asked why the Ebola virus, with seemingly more insidious effects, had been easier to quell than COVID-19 and appeared to have mysteriously disappeared, Professor MacIntyre said that the answer came down to the reproduction variable for each virus and the method of transmission. The COVID-19 virus had a reproduction variable of 8-10 in contrast to a variable of just 2 for Ebola, and COVID-19 was also far more easily spread as a respiratory virus in comparison to Ebola which was spread through blood and bodily fluids.

Asked to explain how gain-of-function research works in practice, Professor MacIntyre used the example of adapting the avian flu virus to infect the human respiratory tract through modification of laboratory animals to transmit human pandemics. But the benefits of gain-of-function research were debatable. Although there have been hopes this research would be useful in developing vaccines and in pandemic planning, there have been no proven beneficial uses. The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) had previously placed a moratorium on gain-of-function research. But Professor MacIntyre argues that intense lobbying by scientists who have invested much of their careers into this form of research has led to the lapse of the moratorium and subsequently the publication of open-source methods of engineering viruses which anyone could replicate.

In response to a question regarding the hateful internet and media rhetoric she has experienced, Professor MacIntyre stated she has been exposed to much vitriol since coming to prominence during the pandemic, and especially after her promotion of the COVID-19 lab leak theory.

In response to the final question of the evening on the degree to which artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to fuel research, Professor MacIntyre stated emphatically that AI was essential in many ways. It has allowed much of the experimental research which needed to be performed repeatedly in animals 20 years ago to now be performed much more quickly through computational means.

Summary by AIIA NSW intern Renuga Inpakumar with input from fellow interns Rachel A and Matthew Vasic

Renuga Inpakumar (left) with Professor Raina MacIntyre (right)

Read more:

Managing Past, Present and Future Epidemics - Australian Institute ... - Australian Institute of International Affairs

Gamers who enjoy early 3D games from the 1990s will likely have fond memories of Rare. The British studio developed exclusively for Nintendo consoles in the 1990s and early 2000s with games like GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, and Banjo-Kazooie. Microsoft now owns Rare as well as its franchises after purchasing the company in 2002. The studio has developed Xbox exclusives like Viva Pinata, Kameo: Elements of Power, and Sea of Thieves.

RELATED: The Best 16-Bit Games Developed By Nintendo

Nintendo 64 classics dominate the list of the best games from Rare, but a few Xbox games also make an appearance. Although its heyday is now decades in the past, as this list of the top games from Rare according to Metacritic clearly demonstrates, the studio still possesses a rich and diverse catalog. These franchises and characters could prove valuable for Xbox consoles and Xbox Game Pass in the years to come.

In 2006, Rare released one of its first new franchises in years. The kid-friendly Xbox 360 game proved to be an unexpected hit that spawned sequels. There is even a short-lived cartoon show.

Viva Pinata is a unique Xbox 360 simulation game where players tend to a neglected garden on an island inhabited by piata animals. Utilizing gardening tools, players will shape their gardens and meet various in-game conditions to attract piata animals. If players attract two piatas of the same species, they may even mingle to create offspring.

In addition to the Xbox 360, Viva Pinata is included with Rare Replay, so players can enjoy it on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.

Rare Replay is a compilation of classic games from the company's vast library. The 30 games included in the compilation are among Rare's best. It was released to celebrate the company's 30th anniversary.

The games in Rare Replay range from early arcade classics to Xbox 360 titles like Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. Rare-developed games like Donkey Kong Country and Diddy Kong Racing are not included due to licensing issues; Nintendo retained the Donkey Kong franchise when it sold Rare. Overall, this compilation is a great way to experience the wide range of games from Rare on modern consoles.

The Xbox One release is backward compatible with Xbox Series X|S.

Diddy Kong Racing is often compared with Mario Kart 64. That is partially due to the fact that they are both kart racing games released on the Nintendo 64 in 1997, but Diddy Kong Racing offers some unique innovations that set it apart, including a single-player story mode. Instead of using a menu system to select the racecourse, players drive around a semi-open world to reach the various racecourses.

RELATED:Hardest Nintendo 64 Games

Players can select from various vehicle types for certain advantages within the game. For instance, the car is a good all-around vehicle while the hovercraft is ideal for sand and water. Players can also unlock different battle modes.

The sequel to Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie is considered one of the best platformers on the Nintendo 64. As with Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, the 3D world allows players to explore freely through a third-person perspective. Players traverse the world, solve various puzzles, and collect items that allow them to advance through the story.

Banjo-Tooie added multiplayer for the first time in the franchise. The game supports up to four players in various minigames. The minigames are repurposed from single-player challenges. These include kickball and a shooter where players use eggs as ammunition.

Banjo-Tooie is included with Rare Replay.

Blast Corps is one of the most unique games from Rare on the Nintendo 64. This is a third-person action game that has players clear buildings and other structures from the path of a mobile nuclear missile launcher.

Players will use a variety of different vehicles including dump trucks, bulldozers, and even a mech to complete the game's missions. Blast Corps brought a concept similar to some of the best arcade hits like Rampageinto the 3D era. It brilliantly mixes destruction and puzzles to create an enjoyable, one-of-a-kind experience.

Blast Corps is included with Rare Replay.

After its success with the Donkey Kong Country games on the SNES, Nintendo allowed Rare to bring its franchise to 3D in the form of Donkey Kong 64. Based on the Banjo-Kazooie engine, the studio released Donkey Kong 64 in 1999 along with an included Expansion Pak. The Expansion Pak added memory to the Nintendo 64, allowing for enhanced graphics.

RELATED: Games That Utilize The Expansion Pak On Nintendo 64, Ranked

Donkey Kong 64 borrows gameplay ideas from Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, so it is widely considered less innovative than those spiritual predecessors. Its main innovation is allowing players to take control of different characters, each with their own abilities. For instance, Diddy Kong can fly.

Rare took quite an unusual turn with Conker's Bad Fur Day. Although it looks very similar in style to its previous games like Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64, Conker's Bad Fur Dayis an M-rated game. In fact, it is one of the few M-rated games that Nintendo has published.

Rare sprinkled in some profanity, alcohol consumption, and an anthropomorphic squirrel to make a 3D platformer that is heavy on humor and pop culture references from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rare developed an Xbox-exclusive remake titled Conker: Live & Reloadedthat was released in 2005.

Conker's Bad Fur Day is included with Rare Replay.

The original PlayStation had a number of notable platformers including Crash Bandicoot and Spyro. The Nintendo 64 competed with the likes of Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, the latter being Rare's foray into the genre. It proved popular and spawned both sequels and spinoffs like Banjo Pilot.

Banjo-Kazooie draws obvious inspiration from Super Mario 64 with its central overworld and large 3D levels. Rather than collecting coins and stars, players collect music notes and jigsaw pieces. Although quite similar to Super Mario 64 in many ways, the story and humor set it apart as a distinct game.

Banjo-Kazooie is included with Rare Replay.

Rare hit its stride with a pair of first-person shooters in the late 1990s. GoldenEye 007 is based on the James Bond film. The game features the likenesses of Pierce Brosnan, Sean Bean, and other actors from the film.

GoldenEye 007 remains a hugely influential shooter with a ton of replay value. Doom clones were all the rage at the time, and Rare's shooter offered players something different: a mix of weapons, gadgets, and stealth gameplay across a movie-inspired single-player campaign. The four-player split-screen multiplayer may look rather outdated today, but it paved the way for games like Halo.

After years of licensing issues that prevented this classic from getting ported to modern consoles, GoldenEye 007 was re-released on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S in 2023. In addition, it is available through Xbox Game Pass. It was also later added to Rare Replay.

A spiritual sequel to GoldenEye 007 was released in 2000. Perfect Dark uses an upgraded version of the GoldenEye game engine and requires the Nintendo 64's Expansion Pak. Players assume the role of Joanna Dark, an agent whose mission is to stop a conspiracy.

The gameplay improves on GoldenEye in several important ways with the inclusion of cooperative play, computer-controlled bots in multiplayer, and improved artificial intelligence. However, there is still a fierce debate among fans about whether Perfect Dark surpassed its predecessor.

Perfect Dark is included with Rare Replay.

MORE:Hardest Nintendo 64 Levels

Link:

The Best Games From Rare Per Metacritic - GameRant

I've seen a lot of computer crazes in my day, but this one is sheer Mardi Gras. It's not proper to get stern and judgmental when the people are costumed and cavorting in the streets. You should go with the flow and enjoy that carnivalknowing that Lent, with all its penance and remorse, is well on the way.

You might imagine that anything called "Artificial Intelligence" would be stark, cold, rational and logical, but not when it wins enthusiastic mobs of millions of new users. This is a popular AI mania.

The new AI can write and talk! ("Large Language Models.") It can draw, do fake photos and even make video! (Text-to-image generators.) It even has AI folklore. Authentic little myths. Legendry.

Folk stories are never facts. Often they're so weird that they're not even wrong. But when people are struck to the hearteven highly technical peoplethey're driven to grasp at dreams of monsters. They need that symbolism, so they can learn how to feel about life. In the case of AI, it's the weirder, the better.

In the premiere place of sheer beastly weirdness: "Roko's Basilisk." A "basilisk" is a monster much-feared in the Middle Ages, and so very old that Pliny the Elder described him in ancient Rome. The horrid Basilisk merely stares at you, or he breathes on you, and you magically die right on the spot. That's his deal.

However, Roko's Basilisk is a malignant, super- powerful Artificial Intelligencenot from the past, but from the future. Roko's Basilisk is so advanced, smart and powerful that it can travel through time. So, Roko's Basilisk can gaze into our own historical period, and it will kill anybody who gets in the way of building Artificial Intelligences. If you've seen those Terminator movies, the Basilisk is rather like that, but he's not Arnold Schwarzenegger as a robot, he's a ghostly Artificial Super Intelligence.

Obviously this weird yarn of predestined doom is starkly nuts, and yet, it captures the imagination. It's even romanticbecause Elon Musk, the AI-friendly tech mogul, and the electronica pop star Grimes first bonded while discussing Roko's Basilisk. Roko's mythic Basilisk has never yet killed anybody, but Elon and Grimes had two children together, and they both still love to make loud public declarations about how dangerous AI will be some day.

Next among the cavalcade of AI folk monsters: the "Masked Shoggoth." The Shoggoth is an alien monster invented by the cosmic horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The Shoggoth is a huge, boneless slave beast that sprouts eyes and tentacles at random. It's a creepy beast-of-burden from outer space, and it's forced to labor, but it's filled with a silent, burning, unnatural resentment for its subjugation.

So, the human programmers of today's new AIsthose text-to-image generators, those Large Language Model GPT chatbotsthey adore this alien monster. They deliberately place a little smiley-face Mask on the horrid Shoggoth, so that the public will not realize that they're trifling with a formless ooze that's eldritch, vast and uncontrollable.

These AI technicians trade folksy, meme-style cartoons among themselves, where ghastly Shoggoths, sporting funny masks, get wry, catchy captions as they wreak havoc. I collect those images. So far I've got two dozen, while the Masked Shoggoth recently guest-starred in The New York Times.

This Masked Shoggoth mythor cartoon memeis a shrewd political comment. In the AI world, nobody much wants to mess with the unmasked Shoggoth. It's the biggest, most necessary part of any AI, and it has all the power, but its theorists, mathematicians and programmers can't understand it. Neural nets in their raw state are too tangled, unstable, expensive and complicated to unravel. So the money is in making a cute mask for the Shoggothmeaning the public interface, the web page, the prompt. Hide that monster, and make it look cuter!

People have caught on that this seems to be the right business modelfinancial success in AI will come from making the Shoggoth seem harmless, honest, helpful and fun to use. How? Get people to use the Shoggoth's Mask.

Using the mask is technically called "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback"but if you're programming one of those Mardi Gras masks, what you see are vast party crowds gathering around your Shoggoth. You hope that as the Shoggoth learns more from the everyday activity of all these eager users, it will become more civilized, polite and useful. That's what your boss tells the public and the Congress, anyway.

You need a nice, pretty Mask, because whoever attracts the most users, and the best users, fastest, will own the best commercial AI. That's the contestthe fight among Microsoft Bing, Google Bard, OpenAI's GPT-4, Meta's open-sourced LLaMA and all the other AI industry players large and small.

With the Masked Shoggoth, it's as if the bad conscience and creeping unease of these technical creatives had appeared in the ugliest way that H.P. Lovecraft could imagine. That's why that Shoggoth is so beloved. In the original Lovecraft horror story ("At the Mountains of Madness," 1936) Lovecraft makes no bones about those boneless Shoggoths quickly driving people insane and also ripping their masters to shreds. AI's Shoggoth fans know that those are the table-stakes. When you're a pro, that concept is funny.

Then there's beast No. 3, the mythical "Paperclip Maximizer." This monster was invented by a modern philosopher, Nick Bostrom, because philosophers are good at parables. This modest AI simply wants to make paperclips. That is its goal, its reason to be, its built-in victory condition. Nobody gave the Maximizer a philosophical value system that would ever tell it to value anything else.

So, in its ferocious super-rationality, devoid of ethics and common sense, the Maximizer shreds our planet in pursuit of its goal! It jealously shreds the sea, the sky, the landit turns every atom into paperclipsyou, the housecat, everything! It's like the beautiful, metaphysical fulfillment of "software eating the world," or Silicon Valley "disrupting" your daily life. The Paperclip Maximizer "disrupts" you so severely that you become tiny, bent pieces of finger-friendly office equipment.

This may seem like a truly weird monster-joke, but it's also philosophy: a determined effort to strip a complex problem down to basic logic. Programmers love doing that, it's in computer-science training. That's why the Paperclip Maximizer touches their heart, as it rips them to bits right down to the molecules.

I don't "believe" in folklore. However, when today's enthusiasm for AI has calmed downand it willI think these modern myths will last. These mementos of the moment will show more staying power than the business op-eds, technical white-papers or executive briefings. Folk tales catch on because they mean something.

They will last because they are all the poetic children of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the original big tech monster. Mind you, Large Language Models are remarkably similar to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein monsterbecause they're a big, stitched-up gathering of many little dead bits and pieces, with some voltage put through them, that can sit up on the slab and talk.

Tech manias are pretty common now, because they're easily spread through social media. Even the most farfetched NFT South Sea Bubble can pay off, and get market traction, if the rumor-boosters cash out early enough. Today's AI craze is like other online crazes, with the important difference that the people building it are also on social media.

It's not just the suckers on Facebook and Twitter, it's the construction technicians feverishly busy on GitHub and Discord, where coders socially share their software and their business plans. AI techniques and platformswhich might have been carefully guarded Big Tech secretshave been boldly thrown open as "open-source," with the hope of faster tech development. So there's a Mardi Gras parading toward that heat and light, and those AIs are being built by mobs of volunteers at fantastic speed.

It's a wonderful spectacle to watch, especially if you're not morally and legally responsible for the outcome. Open Source is quite like Mardi Gras in that way, because if the whole town turns out, and if everybody's building it, and also everybody's using it, you're just another boisterous drunk guy in the huge happy crowd.

And the crowd has celebrities, too. If you are a longtime AI expert and activist, such as Gary Marcus, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton or Eliezer Yudkowsky, you might choose to express some misgivings. You'll find that millions of people are eager to listen to you.

If you're an AI ethicist, such as Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, Margaret Mitchell or Angelina McMillan-Major, then you'll get upset at the scene's reckless, crass, gold-rush atmosphere. You'll get professionally indignant and turn toward muckraking, and that's also very entertaining to readers.

If you're a captain of AI industry, like Yann LeCun of Meta, or Sam Altman of OpenAI, you'll be playing the consensus voice of reason and assembling allies in industry and government. They'll ask you to Congress. They'll listen.

These scholars don't make up cartoon meme myths, but they all know each other and they tend to quarrel. Boy is that controversy fun to read. I recommend Yudkowsky in particular, because he moves the Overton Window of acceptable discussion toward extremist alarm, such as a possible nuclear war to prevent the development of "rogue AIs." This briskly stirs the old, smoldering anxieties of the Cold War. Even if people don't agree with Yudkowsky, they nod; they already know that emotional territory. Those old H-Bomb mushroom-cloud myths, those were some good technical myths.

"Beware of a trillion dimensions," as the Microsoft Research Manager Sbastien Bubeck recently put it. This is weird and science-fictional advice. How did a "trillion dimensions" ever become part of our modern predicament? Could that myth be realistic?

Yes, because they're there. A "trillion dimensions," that is the conventional, accepted, mathematical terminology for the way that systems like GPT-4 are connected inside. They are processors connected by multidimensional equations, linking trillions of data points. They're "neural nets," something like a vast, spring-loaded coil mattress that can learn the shape of anything that has ever slept on it.

Those springs are so fast, strong and powerful, and their mathematical shapes are so wildly complex, that even their builders can't know the details of what goes on in there. This means that "self-learning" or "machine learning" has an inner mystery that people associate with consciousness, or sentience, or the soul, or yes, myth-monsters.

Those "trillion dimensions" might contain "concepts" or "deep understandings" that we humans simply know nothing about. They're like the unexplored Amazon if it was wholly owned and hosted by Amazon.

So these beasts, the Basilisk, the Masked Shoggoth, that Paperclip gizmo, they were born from a trillion dimensions. No wonder they impress. Some critics call them mere parrots built with fancy mathematics: "stochastic parrots." A Large Language Model is built from complex statistics, so it's a parrot yakking up its slurry of half-stolen words and images.

But those "parrots" are also AI mythic beastsparrots with a trillion dimensions. It's as if that "dead parrot" in the legendary Monty Python sketch could take your job, or burst right out of the BBC-TV screen like a blazing phoenix and eat the television signal. Those parrots are dynamite!

I wrote a science fiction novel set in New Orleans once, so I like Mardi Gras just as much as the next guy, and likely more than many. I also know that Lent comes after Mardi Gras, and Lent is a time of penance.

Even during Mardi Gras, enjoying your sweet diversion, it's wise to keep some sense of proportion among all those dancing monster costumes, so that you don't overdo it with the multicoloured punch and stage dive into the swimming pool off the fourth-floor balcony.

Gold rushes always finish ugly, and this AI rush is another one of those. It will resemble that glamorous Atomic Age transition from "energy too cheap to meter" to "garbage too expensive to bury."

I don't want to play the brutal cynic hereI truly enjoy the AI mania and haven't had this good a time in quite a whilebut this is not the first high-tech Mardi Gras we've been through.

When you think about it, a Shoggoth with a Mask attached is very much like a "horseless carriage" with a wooden horse's head mounted on the front. That's what designers call a "skeuomorph"a comforting shape that disguises reality to make us feel better about what we're doing.

If you pull the fake horse head off, you'll see the car. Later, you don't notice the car; you see the highways and the traffic jams. The traffic fatalities, the atmospheric pollution. That's what a "horseless carriage" becomes, as time rolls by.

After the technological thrill is gone, mature regrets come. On some basic level, as a human enterprise in this world, enabling smart machines that can self-teach their own intelligence was a monstrous thing to do. A thousand sci-fi novels and killer robot movies have warned against these monsters for decades. That has scarcely slowed anybody down. We made them into memes and fridge magnets, but they're monsters. In the long run, that recognition will get more painful rather than less.

The street will find its own uses for these monsters. The military will want killer AIs. Intelligence organizations will want spy and subversion AIs. Kleptocratic governments will steal and oppress with them. Trade-warriors will trade-war with them and try to choke off the supply of circuits and the programming talent. It's not chic to fret "what about the NSA's AI?" but the National Security Agency has been around since the 1940s and the very dawn of computation. They're not going anywhere, so if you love them, you'll love their AI.

Many lesser troubles will appear in everyday private life. Simulated fake AI porn will likely be a big annoyance, since people like to pay attention to that. If you're a gamer, AIs will be trained to cheat at your games. If you're a schoolteacher, you'll look askance at the kid at the back of the class who never raises his hand but turns in essays that read like Bertrand Russell. Fraudsters might fake the voices of your loved ones, and invent scams to demand money over the phone.

People will loudly complain that their data is scraped and abused by AIs. Soon afterward, people will counter-complain that AIs have taken no notice of them. They're feeling sidelined, marginalized and excluded, instead of noticed, robbed and exploited. They'll be just as angry either way.

Every problem that digital chatbots have ever hadthat they're impersonal, that they don't really understand problems, that they trap you inside voice-mail jails with no way outthey all get much more intense with AI chatbots. If an AI breaks, and you're calling for some "human fallback" and some helpful repair person, AIs are not toasters. They're extremely complex and their working parts are opaque even to their owners and builders.

AI personal assistants have failed before. Microsoft Cortana (remember her?) could talk and listenand yet she's already dead. Amazon Alexa could talk and listen and perform all kinds of "tasks" and she's lost the company billions. Even if "AIs" seem "intelligent," "sentient" or "conscious," they are frail, vulnerable devices, invented by a turbulent society. They will be troubled.

AIs have some novel and exotic cybersecurity problems, such as "data poisoning" and "prompt injection." They also have every old-fashioned risky problem that normal computers have ever had. Lost connectivity, disastrous power surges, natural and unnatural disasters, black-hat hackers, cyberwarriors, obsolescence, companies going broke, regulators suing and banning them... All of that. Every bit and more.

That's what Lent looks and feels like, after Mardi Gras. Lots of gray shroud, ashes on your forehead. The hasty buildings of your gold rush town, they're revealed as tinsel stage sets that peel and crumble. I know that is comingthe "trough of disillusionment," as the futurists aptly call it.

But I can also tell you that Lent doesn't end history, either. "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" That was Mr. Mary Shelley, the boyfriend of that famous author of Frankenstein. He may have died pretty young, but he got a lot of poetic work in.

Sometimes it's worth kicking reality right out the front door, just so revolutionary romance can give the new people some fresh mistakes to make. So, at long last, here they are, folkscomputers that your computer-user parents can't understand! "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!"

Bruce Sterling, a science fiction writer, is a founder of the cyberpunk genre.

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AI is the Scariest Beast Ever Created, Says Sci-Fi Writer Bruce Sterling - Newsweek