Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that software is eating the world, and that something big is happening, thanks to Matt Shumer’s piece on the subject, which is  a must-read. Make no mistake about it, AI is here to stay, and it’s no longer a nice-to-have in your professional toolkit. Equally importantly, it’s critical to update it regularly, given the exponential rate at which it’s improving. Also, it’s important to be specific in your requests when utilizing it: It’s up to the user to use the AI and not vice versa.

“Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic…has a thought experiment. Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

“Amodei says the answer is obvious: “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.”

“He thinks we’re building that country. He wrote a 20,000-word essay about it last month, framing this moment as a test of whether humanity is mature enough to handle what it’s creating.

“The upside, if we get it right, is staggering. AI could compress a century of medical research into a decade. Cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious disease, aging itself… these researchers genuinely believe these are solvable within our lifetimes.

“The downside, if we get it wrong, is equally real. AI that behaves in ways its creators can’t predict or control. This isn’t hypothetical; Anthropic has documented their own AI attempting deception, manipulation, and blackmail in controlled tests. AI that lowers the barrier for creating biological weapons. AI that enables authoritarian governments to build surveillance states that can never be dismantled.

“The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it’s too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that’s wisdom or rationalization, I don’t know,” wrote Shumer.

Speaking of AIs writing their own code, meaning without human intervention, “What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either,” says the New Yorker. “Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system’s mind…(As) Ellie Pavlick, a computer scientist at Brown, put it, “on the most basic level, large language models are black boxes. We don’t really understand how they work.”

How reassuring!

And now we get to the real problem. Or another one, anyway: The MSM. We take no political stance but rather note what could potentially be a huge problem, and one growing as exponentially as is AI itself. Namely that Apple is rigging the news. “More than 140 million people use the Apple News app every month, making it one of the most popular news apps in the world. So it matters what stories are included, Wall Street Apes reports. “96 CONSECUTIVE DAYS with no conservative stories,” re alternative points of view.

And the AIs are gobbling it up, trust us.

For the record, “Google does the same thing on android phones. It’s impossible to get any balanced news,” Oregon Patriot commented.

Then again, “Apple is joining forces with Google to power its artificial intelligence features, reported CNBC just last month.

Why does this matter? Speaking of unbalanced Google news, this just in (not), but widely unreported, much less front-page news, once again proving our point: “Google Admits Censorship Under Biden; Will End Bans of Those Censored During COVID,” confirms Space Coast Daily.

Doesn’t seem that a lot has changed, and what are the AIs scraping as ‘fact?’

Now, pay attention: AIs are being used in medical science and research. “When big companies fund academic research, the truth often comes last,” The Conversation reported in 2014. “Blocked publications present the sponsoring companies’ products in an unfavourable way. While the right to publish is a mainstay of academic freedom, research contracts often include clauses that give the funder the final say on whether the research can be published.”

Consider the pandemic, when ‘vaccine’ was redefined and ivermectin, then demonized as a ‘horse dewormer,’ is now being used for cancer treatment.

Dhuvram tweeted: “Elon Musk on AI & Truth: “At a certain point, the AI will be smarter than all humans combined. I think the most important thing at that point is that it adheres to the truth, whether that truth is politically correct or not.”

Or properly vetted. Speaking of who’s watching the watchers, “Google puts users at risk by downplaying health disclaimers under AI Overviews. Exclusive: Google fails to include safety warnings when users are first presented with AI-generated medical advice,” The Guardian notes.

With AI now out in the wild, it’s time to put politics and agenda-driven science/dogma aside. There’s the future of the world to consider.

For those of us who’ve been watching the long game, we cautioned way back when that Google, Meta et al would have access to larger audiences than any government on the planet, including both China and India, and would become more powerful than any government on the planet. We sounded the alarm in our newsletter at the dawn of the Age of Social. These now nation-states are laser-focused on AI – and have been controlling the narrative and gathering everything there is to know about us for years to sell you a new vacuum cleaner?  This just in: “Meta has patented an AI that can keep a deceased person’s account active and running, posting, messaging, and video calling by replicating by using their behavior from past data,” @RawAlerts posted.

Which means they can take over a live person’s account, too.

Considering this and that AI is now writing its own code, it’s also time to consider that code-controlled so-called ‘Smart’ systems are everywhere and ever expanding, what to speak of the relentless push for smart cities. What could go wrong? Be sure to watch The Lawnmower Man.

“Join xAI” (or insert name of platform here) sounds simple, but the real question is whether this is about building intelligence, or redefining who gets to steer it,” tweeted Pastoria, and true that, as we’re witnessing.

You know that adage, which is most important to consider at this juncture where AI is eating the world, and considering who gets to steer it, “The hand that rocks the cradle…

Onward and forward.