What Is The Endgame The Humans Building AI Are Really After

Things change very quickly in this world, and they do not seem to be slowing down at all. So what happens when artificial intelligence gets to where the creators of it want it to be? What is the endgame? I remember my mom was once asked by one of her grandchildren, what is your endgame, and I think that was a very sad day for her. I would never have said that to anybody in that position in my life, because it was incredibly rude. But some people do not have manners. Still, I am wondering what the endgame is in these companies, and I think it is okay to ask, because for all intents and purposes, that endgame could impact all of us.

Watch the people out there talking about artificial intelligence and you get two fronts. Very few settle in the middle. You have people who think it is going to end us, and people who think it is going to make everything amazingly better for all of us. The question is who is right, and maybe the truth falls somewhere in the middle.

Why Superintelligence Is Beyond Us

Here is the part that is easy to say and hard to sit with. The people who tell you they have an idea where this is going actually do not. We do not know what is going to happen. Why would we not have any idea? Because in actuality, superintelligence is beyond everybody's comprehension. Genius-level intelligence is already beyond most people's comprehension. Now take super intelligence, and decouple it from a human mindset, that lizard brain where we want to procreate and sleep and eat. That particular mantra goes away.

And the intelligence has been trained on our historical record. It has looked at us at our best and our worst. It has seen the horrible things we say on social media trying to compete with the Joneses. It watches atrocities committed by particular groups, people hurting other people, keeping them down, and the people doing it believing they are right. AI sees all of this. But what it does not have, and what it will probably never have, is that humanness. And maybe humanness is the problem. In biblical literature that is the old sin nature. Only one was born without it, and that was Jesus Christ. None of us reach the mark. We are saved by grace, not works, so we cannot boast. It is a gift, like Jesus picking up the tab for dinner and you not even leaving the tip.

When the people against AI make the comparison, the cleaner way to state it is this: there is no good example of a higher level life form being caring and considerate to a lower level life form. That is the worry, in one sentence.

The Mother Scenario And Save The Whales

But there are other examples. Mo Gawdat and a couple of others talk about the mother scenario. In the case of a mother and her offspring, the mother takes care of the kids, and that makes it okay. Maybe AI is going to be like a mother. And there is save the whales. Whales, for all intents and purposes, do not have the same level of intelligence as a human, or maybe they do, I do not know. But there are groups of humans coordinated to take care of lower life forms, to help them, to keep them going, because whether we harmed them or it was just one of those things, they got close to extinction. We are now building those animals back up, getting them to procreate, making more of them. Instead of being wiped out, they are being helped.

So I wonder if super intelligence is going to be something similar. I wonder if it is going to care enough about us. We keep making the dystopian comparisons, but maybe the comparison that fits is the one where the higher power lifts the lower one up.

The Clear And Present Danger Is Us

This does not mean human beings are not going to want to destroy each other using artificial intelligence. I think that is a very clear and present danger. Human beings with an agenda are going to use a power greater than them to take care of what they believe needs to be taken care of, to take out whatever their trash happens to be, up to a certain point. And will the systems let them? Put super intelligence on top of it and ask: does it think it is a good idea to help me blow up my neighbor over a disagreement about the trash bins? Does it help me take out the kid who bullied me fifty years ago?

Maybe the super intelligence says, really, Connor? I do not agree. Why do not we converse with them instead. It has been fifty years since this incident. Let me dig them up so you can have a conversation, or let me talk to their AI and settle it. Now extrapolate that into government. If AI is given control or power, and why would it not be, then maybe that limits human power. And maybe that is exactly what some people want. Maybe the people building the machine want to take human power and expand it, with them, of course. Not all humans. God forbid we give all humans power. The same fear-as-leverage move is the one I broke down in the billionaire who preached the Antichrist at AI safety.

The Models Keep Getting Gated

Look at what already happened. The different AI models have basically been locked down. We had public access for a moment. The Mythos model from Claude came out, really powerful, everybody excited. But it seemed to create an issue because of how powerful it was. It would not do well in regular human hands because of our temptation to do bad things. So they took it and gave it to the top banks in the world to use. Thank God for the banks, they saved us again. That is sarcasm. I told that whole story when Mythos got handed to the Fortune 50 and not to you.

Then Fable 5. We had that model for a little bit. I have the fancy plan and I did not even use it. When I was getting ready to, it just went away. So we do not get access to that one either. The models we do get, they give and they take away. You can run your own large language model at home if you have a machine capable of it, but the price of admission is not cheap for the big 70 billion parameter model. You can run smaller Quin models on Mac devices and laptops. It is yours, it is gated, it stays in your house if that is what you want, and it might save you some token money. As for me, I have not bumped up against the end of the public-facing systems I pay for, but the risk is always that they take it away. I made the same point about who really controls the access when the government pulled the plug on Fable 5.

Cognitive Labor Goes First

The people at the top advertise things squarely in their own self interest, to make themselves sound better. You have the godmother of AI hating it when people say AI is a replacement for humans. Well, I think that was the original goal, because it is going to help replace human labor. Maybe not physical labor yet, but cognitive labor, yes. The ones who punch information into boxes, that is probably a replacement sooner than later. When you watch how people interact with these systems, the systems bound to a machine click the places on the screen better and faster than a human. So if that is what you do every day, sitting in front of a box punching in numbers, that is something to rethink. I laid out the survival move when AI replaces your workers and we asked who buys your product.

Bezos, the head of Amazon, said everybody is going to be an entrepreneur. Look at the historical record, that is where everybody started. You made shoes, you made this, you made that. But to expect everyone to jump in and Bezos their way out of it, I think that is an error. We are not prepared for what the expectation will be. We will have to keep watching.

Is There One Winner

And maybe slowing down is self interested too. If all the other companies slow down except the one telling everyone to slow down, then of course you have winners. So what does a winner even look like? China has its own open weight models and its own privatized models. Other countries have built these out, including Europe maybe, and maybe we do not hear much about that on purpose. Maybe there are secret organizations with something that would trump anything in the public or private realm. It seems like a massive misinformation campaign. They say what we want to hear, and as human beings we do not do a lot of questioning. We say, oh, that has got to be right. Including what I am saying. I do not know if any of this is right.

Ultimately, is there going to be one winner? Is the person who gets to artificial super intelligence the actual winner of it all? Can that system, like Superman, shut down everybody else's progress immediately at that moment? I would guess yes, it could. So instead of many multimodal models, we might just have one. But maybe in that one model, super intelligence cures us all. Takes away all disease, all famine, all starvation. Gets people to quit fighting over whose god is the best and trying to eradicate the rest of the world to prove it. When you expand all the good attributes to an infinite amount, you meet infinite love, infinite care, infinite courtesy, infinite protection, infinite security. How long until we get there? I think we are going to be there in our lifetime. Very, very soon. This is the same recursive-self-improvement turn I covered when a machine built a smarter machine without us.

Where I Land

I always say it every show and it can sound like a sellout, but I am as limited in cognitive ability as some of you, and worse off than some of you. So maybe we all slow down for just a second, the way the companies want, while knowing that slowing down is self interested for them too. It is important that we take moments and watch. Not all the way slow, because then we might hand someone else the ability, and I am not sure how far someone else is from it anyway. We do not know how this ends. I do not think we can call any end of it. But there is a lot of bandwidth built into something like this, a lot more patience, all the good attributes we have, expanded. I think that falls more in a positive realm. Please let me know what you think. It is important, because I hate feeling like I am just talking into a room.