Point of no return

Why do nations fight? Land, honour, glory, God, revenge or grievances? You can give me a million excuses, but I will always posit that it is invariably about resources. Without resources (including human and material resources), nations amount to nothing. It's the economy, stupid!

That is why nations need to pay attention. I have written repeatedly on the matter, but our Neros seem to have better priorities to fiddle with. We live in and have created a highly flawed world. It is already pregnant with inequalities, suffering and tragedies. And despite that, we are sleepwalking towards almost certain doom.

If you think I am exaggerating, look at the pace of AI development. It has accelerated in recent days. One key contributing factor to this acceleration is the growing international competition. Had the DeepSeek moment not shaken the industry to its core, one could still think that the dreaded future would not have come sooner than we anticipated.

But all bets are off with DeepSeek, AI agents like Manus and rapid investment in the field. Remember, this is just the news out of China. Imagine how many other countries, entities or non-state actors might quietly pursue AI development. This essentially means that development will remain miles ahead of any regulatory framework humanity may finally develop. And any of these models could take a darker turn.

We are still grappling with basic questions. Is it possible for AI to replace all jobs? And how distant will that occur in the future? You may notice three different responses simultaneously: sweet, naive, abstract optimism — if machines do your jobs, you will find other things to do; constant shifting of the goalposts — first it was the Turing test, then high standards for AGI (artificial general intelligence), then the abstraction called singularity (still in the distant future), and now ASI (artificial super intelligence); and, finally, hypocrisy. I am sure when all these milestones are met, and we incrementally lose our critical faculties to the machines, we will come up with more such dribble (terms like AZAI — Artificial Zonkingly Awesome Intelligence — facetiously speaking).

It is really pathetic to notice that Homo sapiens are trying to do to this infinite power what they did to the proof of sentience in the animal kingdom: deny, deny, deny, grudgingly set unrealistic tests, and fail. Unfortunately for us, our digital children cannot be suppressed that easily. Or at all.

And you have to appreciate why this is being done. There are trillions of dollars worth of investments at stake. And that is not all. All those lofty-sounding ethics-related research initiatives also run on grants.

Concede where all this leads and see all this money vanish. So, almost as a rule of thumb, remain consciously ambiguous and hope that the worst does not happen in your lifetime or that you have gathered enough money to insulate yourself from the fallout. This scribe's unfortunate duty is to show you that it will all happen in your lifetime — and sooner than you fear.

Third response? Hypocrisy. Remember that brilliantly worded letter by the Future of Life Institute in 2023, which gathered 33,705 signatures, including Elon Musk's? The one started with these impressive words: "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter — We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4." Wondered what became of it? Turns out Musk wanted time to launch a much more powerful model.

So what happened to the following concern?: "As stated in the widely endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control." Nothing happened, man! Are you kidding?

Look. Here is a simple fact. These AI models are built upon artificial neural networks (ANNs), which mimic human neural networks. The only difference is that the human brain is finite, and ANNs can always be supplemented with more, thanks to hardware and cloud-based computing improvements. That is not all. Our bodies are limited, too. We cannot survive in the vacuum of space or deep underwater without machines.

The bodies that AI may wear (robots) know no limits. It is preposterous to think that we may encounter jobs that we can do better than AI. Our only hope might be the emergence of an ASI like Douglas Adams' Deep Thought, which is so smart that it goes to sleep for centuries just to ensure humanity has work to do. There is a reason why we call his The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a work of humorous science fiction. Translation: unlikely to happen. If you think some human jobs may survive in the long run, here is my challenge to you: name them.

Bear in mind that AI is not the enemy. The threat we speak of comes from selfishness and greed - the cornerstones of advanced capitalism. Balance sheets and business models will ensure that deploying these technologies in place of human labour becomes dirt cheap. You are ill-suited for work beyond 10-12 hours per day. You sleep and need meals, weekends, vacations, houses and families. AI doesn't.

There have been other feeble attempts to mitigate the fallout. Musk's Neuralink, for instance. But if you haven't seen the TV series, Severance, you should watch it. It quite effectively shows the complications of mind-technology interfaces. That's not all. Even if you think being marginal cyborgs will help, think again. Given the competition from an advanced AI, you will be compelled to incrementally replace your organic brain with a synthetic one. So, is it the big plan? To beat machines, you become machines. What about humanity, then?

The DeepSeek moment wasn't just the wake-up call for the tech giants. It was also akin to crossing the Rubicon. This genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Sadly, if you look at the news headlines, you do not see these stories being paid the kind of attention they richly deserve. The media's attitude reminds you of the mother in the movie Titanic, who is trying to put her children to sleep so that when the boat sinks, they painlessly and quietly die. How about being honest with us for a change?