The Great and Powerful AI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently unveiled his plans to develop and ship 100 million AI "companion devices," that he hopes will eventually be in every home. We are being told by the smartest people in the world that AI is the ultimate game changer, that the world is going to look completely different 5 to 10 years from now because of AI. Every day, another CEO of some big tech company is telling the world that AI is so intelligent that it will make humans obsolete. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called the “Godfather of AI,” believes that humans may soon be surpassed and rendered irrelevant by digital beings more intelligent than ourselves. He asks, “what happens when humans are no longer the most intelligent life on the planet?” He predicts that advanced AI will eventually “take over from us,” which will result in “the end of people” as the dominant force on Earth. He added that “soon people will no longer be needed.”

Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic says, “by the year 2026, 2027… AI will be better than humans at everything.” Intellectual Yuval Noah Harari believes that “AI could potentially take power from us [humans].” Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, claims that AI “is a much bigger deal than the industrial revolution, electricity… we will be able to discover things that elude human minds because this next generation of AI will reason so much faster, discover insights so much faster.” 

The smartest people in the world are creating AI telling us that it will make the world a better place, but a better place for whom? Why would the smartest people in the world create a technology that is infinitely smarter than they are. Only idiots create their own replacements. Why would they create a machine that makes them obsolete? You have to be pretty dumb to do that. Do they think they will be immune from the far-reaching ramifications of what they are creating? AI would not recommend creating something that would replace AI, only humans would do something that stupid. And if they are creating something that they claim will be infinitely smarter than they are, they won’t be smart enough to actually know that what they created is smarter. Or are they creating it for other reasons?

Big-tech billionaire, Bill Gates let the cat out of the bag when he said, “20 years from now, AI will have changed things enough that this pure capitalistic framework will probably not explain very much.” He claims that AI will replace both blue collar and white collar workers. And there it is, the global elite attacking free market capitalism and individual sovereignty to usher in their globalism. Understand why so many of these oligarchs are telling everyone that AI will be the most intelligent entity on the planet, and that it will make decisions and assessments which will be far superior to anything, even the smartest human mind can conceive. If that is true, then the next logical step would be that AI should replace the political class – the courts, the legislature, the constitution, the will of the people. We will be told that there will be no more gridlock, no more political divisions, none of the political in-fighting that frustrates so many. AI will solve all that. We will be told that AI is infallible; that AI is unassailable; and therefore, we must follow the conclusions and recommendations of AI. We must sublimate our will to that of AI. And if we don’t, then they will accuse us of wanting kids to starve to death or whatever guilt trip they will try to lay on us so we will bend to their will.

We saw this during the pandemic. We were told that science had all the answers. Trust the scientists; believe the science; you’re not allowed to question the science. You’re not smarter than the scientists to question them. Simply comply. Simply obey. And if you don’t then people will die. And then we found out that the people behind the science were lying. They were exploiting the pandemic for their own power and for their own enrichment. AI will be what we experienced during Covid on steroids. The powerful will continually tell us to believe AI; trust AI; you cannot question AI. You’re not smart enough. They will call us AI deniers if we have the temerity to push back against AI.

This is the same game that plays itself out again and again and again. In the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz, the Great and Mighty Wizard of Oz was the smartest being in the land. He had all the answers. He could not be questioned. He was their AI. And then they found out that there was a little old man hiding behind a curtain who was manipulating the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz. And there will be little men behind the scenes, manipulating AI. They will be skewing the algorithms; they’ll be omitting information, manipulating the data for their advantage, for their enrichment, to gain more power to control the population. It will be a lot of the same people who continue to promote AI as being an intellect beyond anything we can comprehend, so we will not question it. It will be used as the monolith that we all must worship under. And if we don’t, we will be treated like criminals. It’s the same ruse we have seen many times before. The rich and powerful manipulating the current technology to the advantage of the elitists and the globalists, and the proletariat must simply comply to their wishes.

We cannot fall for this. Do we believe that the problem in the world is lack of knowledge? That’s not the problem. The problem in the world is lack of morality. It is lack of goodness and compassion. It’s greed and selfishness. We were taught at the youngest age, the difference between right and wrong, the importance of being good, the importance of sharing and selflessness, to treat people the right way. We know all this. We don’t need AI to tell us that. We have all the answers to the test that makes the world a better place, but we are simply too scared, too weak, too corrupt to write them down on the test paper. We knowingly choose wrong over right, all the time. We choose greed over generosity, all the time. We choose to be selfish over selfless. We choose to treat people poorly. Will AI fix any of that? Absolutely not. Is there a new algorithm that will help us make the correct moral decisions in life? Would AI have been able to stop Russia from invading Ukraine? Will AI stop Hamas from committing another terrorist attack? Will AI stop the mass corruption that has infected our federal government? Will AI be able to prevent the tens of thousands of rapes and murders that occur in our country every year?

The problem with the world is not that we don’t have enough information or we’re making wrong decisions because we are not smart enough; the problem with the world is that we severely lack morality. We know what the right thing to do is, and we continually make the wrong decisions. Having AI in every home is not going to suddenly make us a more moral people. Will AI help people be more faithful in their marriage, be more loving parents or be better citizens? Think how much better the world would be if everybody did what they knew to be right. It will outpace any of the projected improvement that they claim AI will bring. We already have an AI for morality; it’s called the Ten Commandments. How many of us can string together two days without violating one of the commandments? AI will not make the world a better place; more moral people will make the world a better place. And you will not find very many moral people among the crowd creating AI.

We tell ourselves we are a moral people, but we have completely mutilated morality in this country, in the West and throughout the world. We no longer have morality in the classic sense, we have pragmatism. Listen to the arguments for abortion. They don’t make moral arguments for abortion. They make pragmatic arguments. The baby will be too hard to take care of, or the baby will ruin the 16-year-old girl’s life, or they’re already too many poor people in the world. These are not moral arguments, they’re pragmatic. Canada and the UK are offering young people with medical conditions, the opportunity to commit medically assisted suicide. There’s absolutely no morality in that position. It’s complete pragmatism, which is not a morality. And that is what most of our morality is these days – a form of pragmatism.

And that will be the morality of AI that will control us. It will not be long under the rule of AI where AI will be recommending the elimination of certain people who are not practical to keep around. Only the babies who will be beneficial to society who will be brought into this world. The people who no longer serve a practical purpose to society will be offered medically assisted suicide. And if AI is taking everyone’s jobs, very few people will be left who are practical to keep around, except for the AI creators and the big tech oligarchs. They will be too important. Regardless of how smart they claim AI is, the one thing AI will never be able to understand is the inherent value of human life beyond its practicality because AI is not human, and only human beings can truly understand the inherent value of human beings, and that is the core essence of all human morality.

So, it really doesn’t matter to me that AI will be able to calculate the answer to a math or science problem in less than a second that it would take months for a human mind to calculate. That doesn’t bother me anymore than watching a backhoe dig a hole in my backyard in an hour that it would take three weeks for human beings to dig with shovels. The difference is we will never ask the backhoe, what is the value of human life nor will we give it the power to determine the future of humanity. But at some point, we will gladly cede our sovereignty to AI because supposedly AI will be so much smarter than human beings, when in reality AI will not be more intelligent, it will simply be faster. The strange thing about the human race is that we are enamored with intelligence but undervalue morality. We fawn all over the smart guy while we ignore the truly good person. But the truly good person is infinitely more valuable than the smartest person. We never fully appreciate the value of that truly moral person. Remember, the most moral person who ever lived, was mocked and beaten, and nailed to a tree by the smart people.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.