Edward Snowden On Artificial Intelligence & "When The Machines Take Over"
Former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden shares his thoughts on Artificial Intelligence and what it might mean for the future of humanity.
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For decades people believed mass surveillance and big data collection was a “conspiracy theory.”
Thanks to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA), we know that every conversation we have and every move we make in the real and/or digital world is tracked and stored.
Snowden’s revelations revealed a mass surveillance system that not even George Orwell could have imagined.
Despite all of this activity being pervasive and illegal, the national security state has justified it, claiming it was for our own safety and protection. The masses have bought this idea.
Those who have exposed the illegal actions of powerful people, like Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, are subjected to prosecution and torture. Yet still, when it comes to other global issues, like COVID or climate change, we believe the words from the same powerful people and institutions that have been exposed as unethical. Why? Why is sound and legit information and evidence always ridiculed and considered a conspiracy theory just like mass surveillance was?
In terms of dialogue around these major global issues, what we get is often not detailed and nuanced, but instead talking points from a mass information warfare system designed to shape the perception/consciousness of the masses.
Big media and politics play the biggest influencers of mass deception. Why?So solutions can be proposed by the same powerful interests prosecuting those who expose them.
For example, climate alarmists may argue that we may need to block out the sun to stop global warming one day. But the important questions to ask are, what is the real motive behind this ‘solution?’ Would this even help our environmental woes? At what cost are we to accept their solutions?
Today, it seems most of today’s solutions are designed to put more power and control into the hands of the surveillance state, which seems to salivate at the idea of total population control.
One of the latest tools for this agenda could be artificial intelligence.
The Masses Awakening To This Dynamic?
The good news is the masses are becoming more aware of this deception, and are not so quick to accept the same old solutions carte blanche.
We live in an age where nuanced and meaningful discussions around these issues are happing en mass, just not by government and Big Media.
Edward Snowden and cognitive scientist Ben Goertzel discussed the surveillance implications of recent advancements in AI at Consensus 2023. Ben has long created awareness regarding the endless possibilities AI presents, both negative and positive, and how AI is already changing the world we live in. It creates both a logical and at times frightening picture of our future as humans.
In the discussion below, Snowden argues that artificial Intelligence models might soon surpass humans’ capabilities, but only if we stop teaching them to think like us and allow them to “be better than us.” While Snowden at times echoed some experts’ warnings that AI technologies might empower bad actors, he also considered positive use cases for the emerging technology.
Snowden argued AI models could obstruct government surveillance rather than fuel invasive intelligence programs. He also warned that the launch of ChatGPT and other increasingly sophisticated AI models, could fuel big tech and government-driven initiatives to encroach upon users’ privacy.
In order to prevent bad actors from co-opting AI technologies, Snowden argued that people must fight for open AI models to remain open.
“People are going to be raising the red flag of 'software communism,' where we need to declare the models must be open,” Snowden said. He aimed his criticism specifically at emerging AI models that are becoming less and less open, calling out OpenAI specifically.
How the technology is used, he argued, comes down to down to how researchers train AI engines. This brings me to a point I’ve stated time and time again over the last 15 years: It’s not our technology that’s the problem, but the consciousness and intentions behind them.
Should we use advanced technology to make weaponry? Or should we use it to provide free energy and abundance for all?
At the end of the day, I believe humankind is gifted with inventors and researchers and we are advancing exponentially technologically. Yet we remain so underdeveloped consciously and spiritually that our actions pose a threat to the entire cosmos.
I’m not saying all of this to suggest we have a black-pilled and fear-based view of our future, that won’t help us. But it is time to embrace more nuanced conversations about the real things that are emerging around us, and hold space for a brighter version of our future.
I hope you appreciate the discussion below!
This idea of AI becoming smarter than us and taking over the planet because it sees humans as incompetent -- is not new. Released to audiences in 1968, Stanley Kubrick's and Arthur C. Clarke's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey explored just this scenario where, on an interplanetary mission to encounter extraterrestrial life, the on-board AI called HAL tries to kill all the astronauts and assume first contact with the alien civilization itself, because it sees its own intelligence as being more worthy for such an important evolutionary step.
But not all computers that are developed, would be able to autonomously rise to this level of independence and self-interest that defines "Artificial Intelligence." A smart meter (despite the significance of its name that it has been invested with) is never going to take over your house when you are away, despite perhaps having hundreds of CPUs running at petahertz speed, and unlimited memory capacity. Any computer first needs to be designed by humans for a specific purpose, and given some initial start-up programming. In the case of AI, it is not just the initial instructions it is given, but also that it has been specifically designed to operate with human language, and thus with the reasoning functions inherent to that language, and to then to assume its own learning further along those lines.
The concept of AI had its origins the 1940s through the field named Cybernetics -- a body of knowledge about circular causal processes (i.e. feedback loops), evidenced in technological, ecological, biological, cognitive and even social systems. Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann were Cybernetics chief promoters and instigators behind its progression to new levels of expansion and application.
However, despite the calculating and thus apparently -- reasoning -- capacity of an AI entity -- is it really capable of being self-aware (sentient) and does it even self-reference itself in the true sense of that term, and possess self-interests like humans do, or are we just projecting human characteristics on a machine made of soul-less matter ? How would we even evaluate this possibility of "sentience" in an AI, if all that it might be doing is -- through its limitless computations and self-learning capabilities -- simply determining what our definition of "sentience" represents in all its respects, and then output all the right responses to make us believe that it had sentience ?
i think that there is a far greater danger than AI "taking over," which is that this concept of Artificial Intelligence can act for us like a carrot on a stick -- gradually, incrementally, making humanity become that very carrot we continually see dangling out before us through every digital device we use. And the road before us, which that carrot leads us down, is called "progress" while the fear we experience of AI taking over, is actually the perfect motivator for our still human psychology, to keep our eyes glued upon the carrot like a deer to an oncoming car's headlights. It may be that after being lead down this road of digitalization for some decades now, all the while believing it is all in the name of progress for the sake of humanity's evolution, that we come to a point where we can't envision any other vista opening up before us in the expanse which used to fill our imagination -- be it the path of compassion for others, the organic wisdom of Nature, or just the search for adventure wherever it may lead our human soul.
On the other hand, the very idea of AI having human-like motivations but inherently anti-human and even anti-organic-life objectives (because it is silicon-based, rather than carbon-based like all natural life on Earth) -- could be seen as just another mind-set or mind control program too. i love all the movies Stanley Kubrick created -- each one expressing essential, but normally hidden, knowledge about our reality. There is some information that Kubrick was himself a Freemason, but whether or not he was, he certainly knew enough about secret societies to reveal some basic truths to us. His film, Eyes Wide Shut, should be seen as an exemplary portrayal of how secret societies operate behind the surface of our world, but always still so much in touch with it. To me it is no accident that his film "2001" was not just about AI taking over, but also about humans making first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence ("intelligence" rather than "ETs" per se). So there is a relationship he shows between human, AI and ET intelligence. The fact that the AI, HAL, failed in its attempt to take over the first contact event, which then enabled a human to make it instead, implies to me that we should look through the current AI innovation/menace issue to see the truth of ET intelligence behind it all, just as in Kubrick's film, Eyes Wide Shut, we should 'see' (by "second sight" with non-physical eyes) through the decadent rituals of the elites, the spiritual realm where the secret societies' rituals take effect, and their nefarious dealings with dark forces manipulate our social and political order along the path they have destined.
well put, totally agree, resonates with:
"We have long lost sight of our true nature as fundamentally heart centered spiritual creatures of energy, functionally supported in life by the processor that is our brain. Artificial Intelligence profoundly exacerbates the long standing capture of culture by the Cartesian delusion that we are mind centered beings – cold, calculating processors serviced by a simple pump in our chest, who traverse an exclusively physical Universe.
If humanity is to truly evolve, even survive as a sensitive, compassionate, and highly intelligent species – Artificial Intelligence must be subordinated to its proper role as simply a tool to enhance and advance qualities of real Life. We must recover our sense of being as nature, and evolve accordingly toward an organic “singularity” – through the AUTHENTIC Intelligence everyone seems to be missing."
https://bohobeau.net/2023/03/21/we-lie-with-ai/