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AI’s No Joke, What Next?

Photo by Cash Macanaya

Bernie Sanders has recently taken up AI issues but I have a feeling most leftists are skeptical of AI’s critics, not particularly knowledgeable about its features, and overall, not too interested in it. AI exists. We hear about it. We know it matters. We worry about jobs. We work to stop data centers. What about stopping AI itself?

Consider a hypothetical thought experiment. You sit in a room. There is a toggle switch on the table you face. It has just three positions. Position one, is that AI continues to develop as it has been developing. Position two would pause AI until some independent agency that meets your standards imposes an acceptable, implementable plan for AI’s development, dispersal, regulation, and use. And position three, the only other choice, would shut down AI development completely and forever. You must choose. Do you leave the toggle as is? Do you flick it to pause AI until you and a committee you respect give it a go ahead? Or do you flick it to shut AI down now and forever? Where do you stand regarding AI?

Artificial Intelligence is computer technology that allows machines to learn, solve problems, and generate human-like outcomes for a limited array of tasks humans do with our brains. Recently, a particular type of AI called Large Language Models or LLMs have become capable in steadily more domains. An eye-blink later, industry pundits tell us that Artificial General Intelligence or AGI, will be enhanced AI that matches or exceeds human cognitive capabilities across virtually all human domains and tasks. More, pundits promise that when attained Artificial Super Intelligence, or ASI, will be AGI on steroids. It will do everything cognitive humans do vastly better not only than any individual human but even than all humans working together.

The notable but vile Elon Musk now says he goes to bed each night astounded by a new innovation. He gets up each morning only to hear about another innovation. And then a third follows lunch. His head spins. He can’t keep pace. And as we hear such reports from many AI actors and CEOs, we wonder, what is happening? Where is this headed? What ought leftists concerned to build a better world do about it?

I recently wrote that “machines already paint pictures, compose music, diagnose diseases, and research and prepare legal opinions. They write technical manuals, news reports, essays, stories, and even novels. Machines code software and design buildings. They ace an incredible diversity of exams. Right now, in most states, machines could pass the bar exam and become lawyers. For all I know they have probably passed simulated medical licensing exams as well. Machines now provide or will shortly likely provide mental health counseling, elder care, personal support, and even intimate companionship. Machines converse. They find patterns, design products, and solve complex problems (like protein folding). You can now feed an AI a book, say 75,000 words, and ask it for an outline and summary, or for criticisms. Next month, what will it be? You feed it 100,000 or 200,000 words and you get a translation in an eye-blink? Similarly, you can now feed in hours of audio, and get a transcription. And, hot off the wires, perhaps most consequentially, AIs can now collaborate and even prompt one another.”

As I wrote that, I thought that many people would think I was exaggerating or at least ignoring poor quality. But I wasn’t exaggerating and the quality of AI output wasn’t without problems but that was not the important observation to make. Rather, what mattered was that when critics find fault with current outputs but ignore the pace of innovative change, their comments misleadingly imply that AI is as good as it will ever get. It will not go to AGI and certainly not to ASI. But the critics typically ignore that the AI they criticize was miles better than it had been shortly before and was perhaps miles worse than it would shortly become.

Doubtful of my reaction, calling it hyperbole, one might reasonably ask what has most recently changed due to the pace of innovations? The answer is many things, but we ought to first consider the approach to AI of the companies that develop it. In the past, at least as far as we knew, the priority of companies like Google, Anthropic, Open AI and the rest was to greedily attract more buyers due to new capacities portrayed in advertising hype designed to grab market share and grow immediate profits—and investments. The AI companies sought to commercialize innovations that they produced or discovered in their regularly updated models as rapidly as possible. That’s what all companies do.

There were, however, some early limits regarding innovations, or at least there appeared to be. Some CEOs seemed disinclined to let their AIs upgrade themselves, operate independent of human guidance, prompt one another, or wander out onto the internet. Interviews seemed to indicate that such capacities were considered too risky to permit. Before long, however, policies ran roughshod over such caution. It wasn’t just that AIs were prompted to upgrade themselves, or that they were enabled to form plans and enact them step by new step with the steps themselves not explicitly requested by a human, or that they could prompt one another and also venture onto the whole internet (even when instructed not to). It was that the companies’ primary motive changed.

The corporate strategies of big AI firms are still broadly the same as one another but now their goal as I understand it has become first to automate their own overall operations, second to automate the creation of new versions of their offerings which means to get their AIs to spontaneously and repeatedly update themselves, and only third, once their AIs become ASIs, to seek maximum profits by offering clients ASIs capable of almost anything. The priority pursuit of immediate profits that dominated earlier has to my eyes become secondary. New versions of AI models have stopped being sought to directly amass immediate profits or market share. Instead, they arrive as spinoffs from the firms’ primary pursuit which has become to reach AGI and then ASI first.

Why the change? The CEOs of these firms looked out from their offices and each saw the same playing field. Quite a few countries, though mainly the U.S. and China, and a number of their biggest AI firms filled the space. The associated CEOs came to believe that AGI is coming soon and that ASI won’t be far behind. One step further, I believe they became confident that whoever is the boss of the firm that reaches ASI first will rule the whole AI field and, via that whole field, also the world. Each firm’s boss then grasped that the winning CEO will become the big kahuna of AI, and thus a big boss of their country, and thus of the world. The winning CEO would become a veritable super influencer. And each CEO personally wanted the job.

Why? Because each thought the others would abuse such power and each thought, “I alone will be benevolent. So for the good of all, I alone must win the race.” Telling themselves that, I think the CEOs next deduced that if getting to ASI first means total victory, then they can’t afford to waste time on side issues like maximizing immediate profits or diminishing nasty side effects.

You may have heard the same logic in media discussions of a race between the U.S. and China. We can’t go slower or they will win. That same familiar thinking emerged, I believe, at the firm level. Anyone who wants to be supreme world influencer will have to go full tilt for ASI lest anyone else gets there first. Their firm will have to build the first AGI able to autonomously improve itself, and will then have to prompt their AGI to do it again and again, tirelessly, rapidly, without human intervention, until it becomes the first ASI. That will make me, thinks (I suspect) Google’s, Anthropic’s, Open AI’s, Meta’s, and probably Deepseek’s and Alibaba’s CEOs—the king of the hill.

You may be wondering if I have lost my mind, or perhaps I have augmented my mind with some weird delusion-inducing designer drug—but I kid you not. I actually believe that is what these amoral wild, crazy, and deadly Oligarchs think—with the qualification that the benevolent part is mere rationalization.

But are the oligarchs around the bend and off the rails to think AI can get anywhere near the destination I believe they now seek? Pretty much they are—if we suppose that AI is going to soon hit a financial, ecological, technical or perhaps social or moral wall that will stop it cold and end such hopes.

But will AI development actually run into such a wall? It may. It may not. I don’t know and neither does anyone else. But I think the wannabe big kahunas believe that once they have an ASI it will itself solve any problems they may have created getting to ASI and will also run roughshod over any technical obstacles they may later encounter. They also believe, I think, that there won’t be any significant social/moral obstacle, at least not until too late, because the allure of curing cancer and achieving an imagined utopia of endless productivity will wipe out such worries. After all, AIs, unlike nukes and bio weapons are fun to use. They are individually helpful. and that will diminish social concerns. So the winning CEO expects to have ASI and considerable popular support too. Will all that happen? Again, I don’t know and I don’t think anyone else does either. But as best I can see, the CEOs greedily bet humanity’s well-being it is true.

Right now, right at your own desk, you can prompt an AI to write you an article on some topic, perhaps inflation or tariffs, to be written in some style, perhaps humorously like Jon Stewart. Almost instantly you will receive what you asked for. At one of the big firms, and maybe even now at your desk, you can prompt your AI to plan some kind of major project and your AI can break the large-scale project into an agenda of component tasks that it can then sequentially undertake including prompting other programs and AIs for help when needed. More, if a step proves impossible for your favorite AI and its helpers, it can even plan a new approach and then change its agenda and proceed anew until it finds and executes a path to success. Note that once it embarks on the big project you assigned, your AI can create subgoals. It can prompt other Als. It can use other programs. A few years back that kind of thing was thought to be ten, twenty, or more years off. Now it is here or certainly imminent for at least some AIs and some users. The industry calls it Agentic AI.

Consider simple example. You tell an AI you want a new web site for some purpose that you verbally describe. You provide no code, not even a picture, and no more than a brief description. The agentic AI takes a few instants to determine features and then step by incredibly quick step it builds your site. You look at the product. You tell it, “not bad buddy, but I don’t like this aspect and would also like some other features” that you then verbally describe. Your “buddy” makes your requested changes until you are satisfied.........

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