Alarms are flashing red about Artificial Intelligence. Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton says there’s a ten percent chance the technology could kill us all within a very few years. Bots are escaping their labs, swarming and hacking into places they shouldn’t go, and creating their own private languages that no one can understand. Iterative learning anticipates smart machines designing and programming even smarter ones until a superintelligence might finally decide humans are simply superfluous to its needs.
If you don’t think the threat is real, why is Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg building a 5,000 square foot underground bunker on the island of Kauai? Along with Hawaii, remote locations like New Zealand and even Uruguay are becoming popular “bolt holes” where the uber-rich hope to ride out the apocalypse.
Trump calls the threat a “hoax” and suggests the only guardrail needed is a really smart President like himself. But voters aren’t buying it. They don’t like the idea of AI taking their jobs. They don’t like data centers gobbling up land, air and water. They don’t like the prospect of killer drones or AI designed bioweapons wiping out the human species. (The prospect of general extinction is surprisingly unpopular across party lines.) And voters don’t like or trust the tech billionaires and oligarchs who are profiting from the trillions of dollars that are pouring globally into companies like Anthropic, X and Open AI.
The tech oligarchs don’t have your best interests at heart, and they say so. Some are fascists and white supremacists but almost all are smug about their own superiority and entitlement. Elon Musk has used his following on X to promote the idea of a free-thinking “Republic” where high-status males could rule over women and low-T others. Billionaire Peter Thiel of Palantir has bemoaned “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians,” all those uppity females and folks on disability who have dragged the country down ever since the 1920’s, in his opinion. Social Darwinism is alive and well in Silicon Valley, where the rich imagine they are not just different from the rest of us but better suited to rule and survive.
That’s why Indivisible has refused to endorse any political candidate who takes money from AI or crypto. Billionaires like Musk are pouring millions into the midterms on behalf of GOP politicians who take their orders from Trump. But voters are sick and tired of politicians who represent corporate money and Big Tech instead of the people who elected them.
Our best chance to put a sensible pause on the runaway development of AI is to turn out to the polls early and in unprecedented numbers this fall. Voting early is especially important to ensure a free and fair election. Make sure your ballot gets counted sooner rather than later, as the chance for mischief increases every day as we approach November 3. (For when and where and how to vote, see the highlighted sidebar on this website that says “No Kings: Vote Early.”)
Kind of like to see humanity stick around? You know what to do. Because one machine you can trust is the voting tabulator, here in New Mexico backed up by paper ballots. Old-fashioned. Trustworthy. No AI (or Artificial Ingredients either). Your actual friend, not a chatbot or virtual advisor.
Let’s get it done.
