Ever since August 6, 1945, when Enola Gay exploded a nuclear weapon 1900 feet above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, selected in part because it was the island nation’s only port that did not have an American prisoner of war camp, the blast almost instantly incinerating 70% of the buildings and causing 140,000 deaths, untold tens of thousands more in the years that followed, we have used the term Armageddon to describe nuclear war.
Elon Musk warns that the threat posed by Artificial Intelligence is far, far worse.
Armageddon is taken from the New Testament, the last battle between good and evil before the Day of Judgement. Stepping away from the Christian religious aspect, humanity is facing Armageddon, it is much worse than nuclear war, and it is much closer than most people realize.
ChatGPT is all the rage, an already existing free artificial intelligence program that will write on any topic you choose. Homework assignment on the rise and fall of Rome? Piece of cake. It can do your work in a matter of minutes without plagiarizing anyone else’s writing. The teacher will never know you don’t know what a Visigoth is.
Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Alexandra Garfinkle published an excellent story with the headline “90% of online content could be ‘generated by AI by 2025’ expert says.” We will go on faith that she wrote the story, because she is an outstanding reporter, yet in the future, what passes for news can be actually written by AI, and whoever is or is not an “expert” could be determined by whoever informed the computer what to think.
Despite repeated warnings of unregulated artificial intelligence’s potential, it's use and applications are growing exponentially, while the only people legally capable of regulating it – Congress – are not instilling much confidence in their ability to accomplish much of anything. We are reading in the news, not knowing who or what machine wrote the story, that Congress will most likely be fairly stagnant for the next two years, and as the Yahoo Finance story suggests, AI will be writing the news by the time the current Congresses' term ends in 2025.
Who will write our stories? What machine will be capable of crafting words with the poignance of John Donne:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
photo: Getty Images