There’s a myth that if 100 monkeys were in a room filled with typewriters for 100 years, they would eventually make a perfect replica of Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. And we know that’s not true, but let’s just kind of run with that theory for a while: that when you take some kind of stupid animals, even less smart than humans, and you just give them enough time and experimental equipment, they eventually stumble upon scientific breakthroughs.
So let’s think about how that looks in terms of the creation of nuclear power/energy, which makes nuclear bombs, and then let’s look at AI.
So in my version of Idiocracy 2, the plot is that humans have gotten to this Idiocracy point where they realize they can’t wage any kind of nuclear war because they’re too stupid to make a working nuclear bomb. The top science lab literally can’t get it done because they’ve all lost so much cognitive ability.
And then, kind of, the happy ending of Idiocracy 2 is that we realize it’s kind of for the best, and maybe we are kind of starting over. The characters realize they’ve created this technology that we don’t have the emotional intelligence – or evolved brains – to do anything with it besides killing each other. At least with fire, we cooked meat. This we’re like, yes, nuclear energy can desalinate water or make clean energy – but lo, let’s kill our fellow man with it as a primary use case.
Now onto AI, artificial intelligence. Let’s talk about what these two things have in common: AI and nuclear bombs.
Okay. So we realized that we could get all this power by splitting the atom. We had the scientific know-how because we are monkeys with typewriters and a lot of time and money, and, a broken clock being right twice a day, we stumble onto something once in a while. In this case, enter the extraordinary computational linguistic Sam Altman.
Like Oppenheimer, Sam Altman discovered a source of tremendous power. But because humans are in this idiocy, this empathetic-lacking evolutionary infancy, much like primates, we are still operating out of the middle brain (lizard brain – the mid brain as opposed to the neo-frontal cortex). And sitting on ChatGPT we just didn’t have the emotional intelligence to really do much with this new technology without generating pictures of women with big boobs and thinking about, like: how can we use it to kill each other? Picture Palmer Lucky.
Thus AI-powered weapons. That’s our best idea for our monkey leaders, these murderous apes with low emotional intelligence. Their best idea: Let’s use AI to destroy humanity.
And these sort of narcissistic, violent people tend to come into power after they’ve created chimpanzee Romeo and Juliet. The monkeys hop and clap when they wipe out 100,000 people in Hiroshima in an instant. Today, they all work to make a new nuclear bomb that could kill potentially1 million people – 3 million people.
These evil monkey leaders are not focused on how to make technology reduce poverty. Maybe empaths aren’t good at power grabs. A bunch of monkeys sat in a room, and they came up with generative AI and this very, very useful language tool. And the first thing they thought of to do with it is: how do we lay everybody off? How do we oppress everybody? How do we steal all the money? How do we use this to murder people? How do we ensure that recent college grads fail to earn a living? How can everyone lose their government benefits? How can all this money come to me me me and I’m the first trillionaire?
I do a lecture series called “Chat GPT and the Human Resistance” and gave a talk at Burning Man to explain how AI weapons are like computers beating humans at chess. Able to precise than anything, a human being could do. Their dream of AGI would just take all this screwed up slop, this desire to kill us, and operationalize it on a new level.
When we hear Trump talking about Iran and saying, “We don’t want those them to have the bomb,” we raise our hands and say, yes, we agree, we don’t want them to have the bomb. But then keep your hands up if you don’t want Trump the Orange Orangutang to have the bomb either. We don’t want Los Alamos to get 6 billion a year to make a grapefruit-sized capsule that burns a million people to death. We don’t want Drump to have that power – he’s an ape.
Since I started writing this essay, Trump posted an AI picture with his finger presumably on the button of a nuclear bomb. It’s time to say: we need to stop. We need to pause AI and R&D for new nuclear weapons. We’re just not ready. We’re just not there. We are a bunch of chimps who can’t handle the technology we stumbled upon.