Right, this is off topic, but if you are a reader here, the videos above and below are most definitely in your lane.
AI Overview:
AI alignment is the practice of designing Artificial Intelligence systems so their goals, behaviors, and actions are consistent with human values, intentions, and societal norms. It is a research field focused on making AI helpful, safe, and reliable by preventing unintended consequences and harmful behaviors, like bias or misinformation, and ensuring human control and trust in these increasingly powerful systems.
This is not off-topic. AI poses an existential threat to humanity. Like social media, it’s designed to steal our time & ultimately this could lead to a takeover.
We have been warned.
Why just a million lives?
I’m fundamentally a pessimist about technology as a whole. Although, it’s not really technology itself that is the problem, it’s human wisdom, or the lack of it, in creating and using it. We create new technologies to increase human abilities, which sounds great, but we fail, continuously, to foresee unintended consequences from those technologies. Even when we can predict possible negative outcomes from them, we plow on anyway. We knew inventing the nuclear bomb was a Pandora’s Box – it didn’t stop us. A large part of the reason for plowing on is tribal competition – that’s exactly what is happening with AI right now – and it all but guarantees we won’t have real guardrails in place with it.
What do we already see with AI? The theft of the IP of artists, musicians, writers, and other creators without their permission or reimbursement to create AI equivalents of that original work (all profits of which go to the handful of companies that created the AI models).
The funny AI videos we see right now are the mask that covers the reality that we are living, or very nearly about to live, in a real post truth society. Even if a video clip is real, say a real photojournalist capturing real footage of a war atrocity, it won’t be believed by many because it will be called ‘fake’. Already, bots can create rumors and lies on social media endlessly. AI is increasingly being used in mainstream media. How can we really believe anything? What effect will this have on our societies and governance?
Additionally, the loss of jobs from this technology in all sectors of our economy will have deep impacts of which we’re only just realizing.
Existentially, I’m not actually worried so much about a super-intelligent AI itself. I’m deeply, deeply worried about humanity’s response to it, though. It’s entirely predictable that we will respond poorly to a clearly more intelligent being than ourselves. We will become frightened and try to limit, enslave, or even shut down that intelligence, and that’s where future conflict may arise.
But even without that doomsday scenario, we know we have massive societal and governmental upheavals even without it. All so we can create shortcuts in our thinking and own research (well, AI says this because someone else on the Internet said it and AI copied it, so it must be true), create flying cat videos, and so a very small handful of people can become immensely wealthy. Call me crazy, but I’m not sure that’s worth it.
Just watched the video. Not a fan of the rapid cuts – but I guess that’s the TikTok generation for you. Favorite parts:
4:14 “Mind your head”
7:19 “Cognition outsourcing”
Exactly.
And AI is not off-topic here, because how we gather and process information about climate change science, which AI will affect greatly in the future, is the whole point of this blog. Killing us all is just another possible outcome.
Related, recent article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly17834524o
I’m going on about this – it’s a fascinating subject for me, anyway – but it’s also news today that Peter Thiel believes Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist for wanting to limit AI.
Inside billionaire Peter Thiel’s private lectures: Warnings of ‘the Antichrist’ and U.S. destruction
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/
I wasn’t aware Thunberg wants to limit AI in just the United States and allow it in places like China. Huh.
Peter Thiel had also tried to build a bunker in New Zealand – government blocked the libertarian, though:
How Tech Leaders Prep for Doomsday, From Bunkers to Guns – Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-doomsday-prepper-bunkers-shelters-guns-zuckerberg-altman-2025-7
New Zealand is on a fault line the last I heard. I suppose there are other reasons to build a bunker there.
A comforting thought: these are the same people leading the race to build AI.
We’ve already constructed something that kills millions for its own survival: The innately sociopathic profit motive of corporations.
Working slaves to death, using a cheaper toxic ingredient or process, buying off politicians to protect a climate-trashing industry, making cigarettes even more addictive over time, paving over things is cheaper than preserving flood buffers or aquifer recharge zones, convincing people they have to fly to exotic places to be happy, etc.
https://www.insidehook.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/tom-toro-climate-cartoon-1.jpg