Over 800 public figures, including "AI godfathers" and Steve Wozniak, sign open letter to ban superintelligent AI

[VectorVortec]

Machines can learn, but they can't think. I can't imagine why these people are afraid.

 

[OortCloud]

Given the people spending the big bucks on this - Elon Musk, Jeff Beezos, and Mark Zuckerberg for instance - do you really think any of them are going to have any moral compass about this? They have proven themselves time and again to be utterly disinterested in anybody but themselves, money and power and have zero morality. This, combined with the complete chaos in the States these days, means there is zero chance of any kind of regulation, as all the current administration is interested in is money and corruption. So unfortunately the rest of world can only sit and watch as the US flushes itself down the toilet and just pray they don't take the rest of us along for the ride.

 

[calvinblanes]

I'm on the 5%. The system is working exactly as intended, and that is the problem. I have seen enough to know that we either fix it to live all better or I don't mind if it gets destroyed, even if it wipes me and my family in the process.

 

[Axeia]

That’s not how things work.

My uncle was a senior analyst in military intelligence—one of those guys standing three rows back when the president was being briefed in the war room. Over dinner one night (and after a bottle of wine), he got a little loose-lipped. Before his wife shut him down for treading into classified territory, he talked about China’s capabilities versus ours. His general point was simple: if you’ve heard of it, it doesn’t matter. The U.S. military is usually 20–30 years ahead, technologically, of whatever’s publicly known.

This was twenty years ago, and he’s since passed, but I believed every word. This was a man who, even in retirement, had a government-grade surveillance system monitoring his property line.

If that’s true, then superintelligent AI isn’t something “on the horizon”—it’s already here, and not in the hands of Meta or Elon Musk. The U.S. doesn’t wait for private industry to invent such things; if it’s deemed too dangerous for civilians, it gets quietly folded into the black budget.

So when we talk about AI and geopolitics, we should leave military capability out of the conversation—they’re not even playing the same game.

Don't mean to speak bad of your uncle but if the US government truly had tech decades ahead of the rest of the world then why is it doing so poorly in so many metrics compared to other modern Nations?
If it had say a super intelligent AI than why is it spending 500 billion USD on project Stargate? Seems like a moonshot attempt at getting ahead instead of being so. I imagine that could have put a dent in say the debt, poverty or education problems.

Think the more likely explanation is that the US government thought they were decades ahead in certain areas according to certain estimates.
China has crushed pretty much all expectations so that would no longer hold true with a more current evaluation. It might have not surpassed the US in pretty much anything but it did definitely catch up slot in almost everything.

Considering the investments the US is making I highly doubt they're miles ahead in AI but definitely very desperate in trying to be.

Alternatively the supposedly decades ahead tech should be used to have clear advantage over other nations right? But the US main battle tank uses a German licensed main gun and the navys new constellation class is based on a French/Italian design. The only thing they're decades ahead imo is aircraft carriers, but that's in large parts because they require investments on a scale no one besides since recently China can muster.

 

[jeffbert]

O.k., but what nation invented the characters of Lex Luthor & Brainiac? Not to mention SKYNET & HAL 9000?