Katherine’s note: Hardly any of the text that appears in this AI research collection is my own writing. Almost every good piece of writing you'll see here was copied and pasted verbatim from articles and books that expressed important thoughts I wanted to refer to later. If you see text with weird line breaks and lots of random spaces, you can be entirely certain I did not write it.

With that said, here is the only thing I can say for sure was written by me:

ITS COMING

Far out at sea, a tsunami is churning up a tower of heaving seawater. Swells have begun appearing along the shoreline, but few recognize the significance of the rising tide. The tsunami’s conjurers, a handful of billionaire investors and an elite group of powerful technology companies, are the only ones with a clear sense of what’s coming.

The tidal wave these companies are nurturing is AI. It is currently a toddler, but it is growing at an exponential pace. When it finally grows up and crashes against the nations of Earth, it will be inexorable, powerful, and inconceivably massive. It will be the largest cataclysm ever to hit humankind. It will sweep its way across our planet, blasting everything in its path, including our economy, the natural world, our way of life — even our very survival as a species.

I am referring to AI, artificial intelligence — the technological development to beat all technological developments, humanity’s most powerful creation, the invention which may well be our last.

The tsunami threatening to drown humanity has taken form with incredible speed. The first demo of Chat GPT, the jaw-dropping AI that proved computers could use language as well as any human being and compose text at lightning speed, was released less than two years ago, on November 30, 2022. OpenAI, the company behind it, was created in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and Sam Brockman with initial funding of $___.

Less than a decade later, OpenAI is worth $159 billion. This week the company received one of the largest venture capital infusions in US history, $6.6 billion….

Elon has since left the company and Sam Altman now heads it up. Though the technologies that underpin AI have existed for some time, it’s only since late 2022, with the emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, that the technology that approached intelligence appeared to be much closer.…

[end of Katherine’s writing]

In a 2023 report by Microsoft Canada, president Chris Barry proclaimed that “the era of AI is here, ushering in a transformative wave with potential to touch every facet of our lives”, and that “it is not just a technological advancement; it is a societal shift”. https://www.theguardian.com/news/article/2024/aug/08/no-god-in-the-machine-the-pitfalls-of-ai-worship

Sam Altman warns AI could kill us all. But he still wants the world to use it

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/31/tech/sam-altman-ai-risk-taker/index.html

“one of the most disruptive technologies in centuries” - Foreign Affairs

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/artificial-intelligences-threat-democracy

Look at it thus. The first step will be AI surpassing humans at most tasks: doing them more cheaply, and quicker, and noticeably better. This will be when the economic turmoil kicks in, when the jobs start to go, first a trickle then a flood. The next stage will be when AI successfully does tasks in ways we did not expect, but which are remarkable, and deeply impressive: this will hopefully be a good or even wonderful moment, we can expect massive medical advances, perhaps a cure for cancer, perhaps a cure for old age and death. World peace, maybe. Or terrible unexpected weapons, if we don’t catch a break.

AI will eventually be better than us in ways we do not understand

And then, after that, there is a third and potentially final stage, when AI becomes so advanced it does things that only AI, or another AI, can nderstand and for reasons only AI knows (and which, even if AI tried to explain to us, we would not comprehend). AI at this point will have so far outreached us, when we attempt to grasp its doings we will be like dogs trying to understand economics, or like fungi presented with the works of Bach. All we will know is that AI does mighty and incredible works. AI will appear omniscient and ineffable, AI will, in other words, resemble a deity. Moving in mysterious ways, Its wonders to perform.