Elon Musk Says AI Has The Potential To End Civilization
I think he means “it could end economic and social exploitation and take my fortune — heaven forbid, I’d become just another guy…”
Bruce said the other day, “You had a pretty interesting upbringing growing up in three households.” We were talking about our backgrounds — Bruce growing up in a Philly rowhouse playing ball in the streets, me growing up in an orange grove, rural wilderness, Hollywood, and wealthy Milwaukee suburb. I attended the most racially-mixed Junior High in the U.S. (LeConte Jr. High in Hollywood). I graduated from a gigantic small-town high school in a community made famous by political speech writer, Rhodes Scholar, and former editor of the Harvard Crimson, James Fallows.
It’s Redlands. And my growing up there and being part of a non-elite, longtime family formed the values that I have always lived by. The many, many good people I knew and loved and who knew and loved me, as teachers, friends, pastors, co-workers, neighbors, and colleagues — yeah, it’s “real America.” It’s real life and this is how the overwhelming majority of people live all over the world, every day, all the time, day-in-day-out.
My family knew Dr. Fallows, James Fallows’ father. But by the time you get to be somebody like James Fallows, you have no time nor inclination to answer emails or bother to respond at all or give any consideration to individuals less-wealthy and less-important than you.
I’ve worked in every industry except Fortune 100 (and I’ve worked for them too — as a contractor). That means government, non-profit, and for-profit business. I have done at least 400 business plans, and prepared at least 100 marketing studies, and I’ve reviewed thousands upon thousands of financial statements. Every day, I research information to write articles or white papers or procedure manuals. I’ve conventionally published 50 books, most nonfiction, though I’ve also published more fiction conventionally than many people. I was a college English teacher for 20 years. I raised tens of millions of dollars for homeless families in Los Angeles, and I’ve helped businesses to raise over $250 million in capital investment or business loans.
For the past five years, I’ve been working to improve my physical health. I no longer eat processed foods of any type. I exercise every day in varied ways. I have now realized that this has improved my mental health as well.
I have now realized that all of this, I was compelled to do by my nature and by the world.
This a.m., talking with Bruce, I said, “Something is coming. It’s big.”
Tears formed in the corners of my eyes. I was overwhelmed.
“The last time — I think something like this — I was only seven years old.”
I was sitting on our living room carpet in the Grove house, eating Oreos and drinking an 8 ounce glass of cold milk and watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon.
Yes, I am the author of Buzz Aldrin, The Pilot of the First Moon Landing.
For certain, AI language programs will be able to write such books in the future.
I never liked change: in fact, I stayed too long in quite a few of my jobs and in my relationships.
All the same, I’ve changed more, and been more flexible, than I could have ever imagined.
Now that I’m well and healthy, I can also think things through a little better.
As I’ve written, AI isn’t “intelligent” in the way we humans or other animals are. It doesn’t have the same volitional motives. It’s not going to become SkyNet and create Terminators. It’s not going to become AM and kill everyone except a tiny band of humans it’s going to make immortal and torture until the end of time.
Harlan Ellison, my friend and mentor who wrote the famous story about the supercomputer AM, was angry. He was fueled by an inner fire of rage because he was a poor Jewish boy from Cleveland and he was wise and observant and smart enough to know that a short, genius kid like him could go far if he was tough and fought —
But he’d never be a Rockefeller, a DuPont, a Rothschild, a Bush. Not even Hollywood royalty: he was too young for that.
And he was of too early a generation to be where I am right now.
Sitting on the edge of a very different way of living with the potential to be vastly more healthy and joyous, not just for the majority of humanity, but also for all the other living creatures and things on our planet.
Maybe someday humans really will go to the stars — and AI will be our partner. But for right now, it will be best to move toward health, healing, good living, and recovery from our long, disturbed time under the thumb of complete and total sociopathic lunatics with the same attitude and care for life and humanity as Harlan’s hate-filled supercomputer, AM.
Elon Musk says,
“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production, in the sense that it is, it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilization destruction.”
Here is a comment from someone who has exhibited minimal interest in civilization, but maximum interest in … what would it be?
Oh, that’s right! Himself.
AI can help humans do many things, chief among them, understand topics more quickly and learn more quickly. Why would that represent an end to “civilization” and — what is civilization, anyway?
Bruce and I just watched a very good and heart-wrenching documentary about the history of slavery in Florida, produced by one of Florida’s HBCUs, Florida State University. The sentiments of early Florida leaders are echoed by the comments of antebellum Virginia Senator Robert T. Hunter:
There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery.
This is why people like Ron DeSantis echo the sentiments of today’s versions of Robert T. Hunter today.
They use the word “civilization” as synonym to their own wealth, prestige, and comfort. Every one, and every other thing, is subservient to that, and in the short, not the long-term.
As someone who has freed herself from the severe physical and emotional abuse she grew up with, I have learned my own lesson about this.
When Elon Musk says that AI is a threat to “civilization,” he means it is a threat to himself in the same way the Virginia Senator (and all of like-mind to him) do today.
It is not about the power of individuals like Musk, Zuckerberg, or the octogenarian U.S. President or Senators who also think in this way.
It’s about the power of all of the rest of us eight billions.
So let’s play a thought experiment. If, tomorrow, you learned you had lost your job or had no more cash income, what would you do?
What if everyone was in the same situation?
You would gather your thoughts, contact all your loved ones and friends, and make a plan to move forward, wouldn’t you?
Did you know there are five small, incredibly beautiful towns on the Italian Riviera called Cinque Terre where there are no cars, which are accessible only by water and walking or mules? They live well and happily there. If the Internet got cut off, nothing much would happen to disrupt life.
4 billion of us, half, live without Internet, Hot Pockets, Chee-tos, and Call of Duty. They don’t have to show up to work in jobs they hate just to get by. They don’t have to pay attention to politics or Trump. They don’t have to eat mutant chicken or tomatoes crossed with salmon.
When I was a girl, on Saturdays where I didn’t have sports, Girl Scouts, or something else to do, I’d take my dog Freckles and go out exploring. When I came home, I’d work in the garden, and then I’d fix dinner for my grandparents.
Maybe I would go over to my friend’s house to play.
That’s “civilization.”
AI has the potential to give every hour back to us out of our lives that has been stolen by people like Musk, or back in the day, people like the slave-owning Virginia Senator who yelled how important it was to destroy others’ lives and families for his own wealth and comfort, calling it “civilization.”
Civilization is us. We non-abusive humans are civilization.
And now I am going to go out on an adventure — just like back in the day.
I so miss Freckles — and Gambit — and Badger.
"Civilization" is always used to describe places, people and ideas set by wealthy and well-educated people, mostly white ones. The idea being that only people of this background were allowed to set the tone for the society, and that no one else in it mattered.
I still remember the tagline of an old commercial for Right Guard deodorant: "Anything less would be uncivilized". The spokesman at that time was professional basketball legend Charles Barkley (significantly, a non-white man) aping the mannerisms of an English gentleman (for that nation perfected and exploited the idea of "civilization" at its finest). Given that Barkley's race is one that historically was and is excluded from the idea of "civilization", the irony was very obvious to me.
It's also not surprising that the same Latin root of civilization also spawned the term "civility"- the similarity arbitrary dictation of community standards from above, which 21st century culture has both undermined and reinforced in different venues.
Consequently, as a white man- the one group of people it seems everyone hates- I try to govern my words and deeds as accordingly to these standards as possible, while also seeking in private ways to make them change.
Maybe someday humans really will go to the stars — and AI will be our partner. But for right now, it will be best to move toward health, healing, good living, and recovery from our long, disturbed time under the thumb of complete and total sociopathic lunatics with the same attitude and care for life and humanity as Harlan’s hate-filled supercomputer, AM.
"AI is neither." So I was told by someone close to the big-name "AI" researcher who said it. It encapsulates the AI fervor perfectly. It's the same fervor that pushed electric cars with full self driving, "the blockchain", NFTs (whatever they were supposed to be), and every other tech-scam boondoggle you've heard of since the dot-com days. Enron never went away, but metastasized among all the other useless rich who need everything to stay exactly as it is, even as it's destroying Nature at the deepest level.
AI is mostly a mix of planned obsolescence and shiny-new-thing hype, to get people to buy the latest revisions of their OS and Microsoft Office. If it becomes adopted more than any of the flameouts I mentioned, AI will inevitably cause more problems than it solves. Which, of course, means you'll need to buy the next version of whatever to "solve" the problem you already bought.
The life you had as a kid was like what I had as a kid in the 70s and early 80s. Not too much TV, even then more books and magazines than I could ever read, and computers a promising oddity. I'll admit I believed in the promise of computers, but instead they've become another power concentrator for the sociopaths.
Do you know David Golumbia? Longtime critic of "computers", in the broadest sense. Just found out about him. You might dig him. He just died!
https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2023/09/18/in-memory-of-david-golumbia/