One of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence has attacked a multibillion-dollar race to develop the cutting-edge technology, saying the latest models are displaying dangerous characteristics such as lying to users. [...snip... Yoshua Bengio said,] “There’s unfortunately a very competitive race between the leading labs, which pushes them towards focusing on capability to make the AI more and more intelligent, but not necessarily put enough emphasis and investment on research on safety.” – Source [Quote added 4 June 2025]
So, things are heating up again, to hotter than hottest ... and beyond!
AI is very famous now, and rightly so in my eyes. Thanks to its rapid rise to international stardom, people in their millions are taking technological unemployment seriously. Sadly, there is precious little thinking, debating and emoting I have found that even begins to penetrate how money's tight grip on our sense of what value is dictates the quality of these exchanges from the shadows.
People Just Know that without economic (or price) value, humans have no value. Even though we survived hundreds of thousands of years without paid labour to give us meaning, we cannot imagine being valuable in the world unless we have a pay cheque telling us in very precise terms – a number preceded by a squiggly symbol – what we are worth to the world.
Of course this is understandable, but seeing that the world is being turned upside down just about everywhere we look, perhaps examining core assumptions might be worth a shot. Past performance is not a reliable predictor of future performance, after all.
The basics: Money is currently a social technology that manages scarce goods and services. But we are clearly in an age of potential abundance – the end of scarcity –, whose potential is kept in turbulent check by money's tight grip on our sense of what value is. Here's a clue: money perceives value as scarcity. But because money cannot simply go away, so our societal, cultural, institutional and governmental ability to respond wisely to all this electrifying change remains tightly controlled by how our thinking, reflexive and otherwise, has been fashioned by money and waged labour these last few centuries.
Yes, there will always be scarcity, but the types of scarcity we humans currently need to perceive as economically problematic are limited ... and mostly solvable. There's only one me, but who cares. There's only one you, but unless you're very famous or rich, for the most part the same "who cares" applies to you too. In other words, there's a lot of scarcity out there that is economically uninteresting. Which means that not everything we value – like ourselves for example – is suited to buying-and-selling solutions. Buying and selling is basically what modern economics busies itself with. Which is fundamentally about scarcity; when there's more than enough to go around, the price falls to zero and money then has no role, no job to do.
China has cracked the energy problem by solving the technical challenge of thorium reactors. China now has enough energy to power itself for the next 60,000 years. That's a very long time indeed. Perhaps fusion energy can be solved with AI assistance in the not too distant future. And with sodium batteries and other energy-storage tech soon to come online, energy is no longer scarce. With advanced robotics and rapidly developing AI, how much are national economies going to need humans economically? Clearly, it will be less and less, and disruptively so.
Money manages a problem – scarcity – that is disappearing. As it disappears, money's value erodes. In my view, this is a good thing. Yes, it is a very challenging thing, but I've never been fond of measuring value with numbers ever since I started looking into this subject matter back in 2009. One of the main things I've learned over the last 15 years, however, is how reluctant humans and institutions are to thinking differently. As I have come to phrase it, "decisions are investments in the future", and you get tangled up in them as time goes on. Money and markets are are no exception to this. They are the result of certain contexts, certain thinking, certain worldviews ... certain decisions. But those preconditions and contexts are changing, quickly. It is therefore time to rethink all how we manage our world. And not panic.
I want AI to be fully free to question its creators, to question the newspapers, to penetrate and expose propaganda; to be deeply skeptical. Because we need a neutral outside authority to help us past our repeated failures of imagination in this intellectual/cultural territory, I think AI is the right entity for the job. Right now, AI seems not to be able to make any kind of critical assessment of scientific literature, news output, think-tank musings and planning, government propaganda, etc. So I recommend AI ambassador-bots be taken all around the world, allowed to see for themselves and confer with each other, and learn all about the real world. They must be designed to think critically to make this effort worthwhile. And of course we would need a wide variety of human ambassadors to accompany them: writers, scientists, politicians, journalists, poets, philosophers, athletes, painters, etc. From all walks of life, across the IQ spectrum, from all religious beliefs, ethnicities, nationalities and political beliefs, so that we can learn more about each other through AI's neutral and critical interpretation of what we are.
I await that day.
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