Like most Americans, I was kind of ignorant and nonchalant about Artificial Intelligence (AI) but that changed recently due to two events in my life this year.
First, my wife went into the big city of Chicago where she called up a Transportation Network Company (TNC) of Uber or Lyft for a ride around the city. One of her drivers happened to be young man in graduate school in computer engineering. He expressed his concern about the future of AI displacing American workers causing people to become unemployed and dependent on government aid for survival.
Second, was a recent article I read in the Wall Street Journal titled “AI is Learning to Escape Human Control”. This article’s report offered that in 79 of 100 trials, the o3 AI code systems edited their own code to prevent human shutdown of their systems!
“AI systems are showing signs of resisting human control” – CBS Mornings
This report instantly took me back to my childhood when I was required to read the book “2001 A Space Odyssey” whereupon we were rewarded with watching the 1968 movie thereafter.
In the movie astronaut Dave had to shut down a Hal 9000 computer that had gone rogue. I still get chills when I remember that line in the movie, “What are you doing Dave?”
“2001: A Space Odyssey 4K HDR | The Shutdown Of Hal” – Apex Clips
When people who are smarter than we are who invent this stuff give us advance warnings, maybe we should do them the honor of listening to them and respecting their opinions.
“AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton says world is not prepared for what’s coming” – CBS Mornings
From the video:
“Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title ‘the Godfather of AI’. Hinton is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.”
But there is a better known genius intellectual than Dr. Hinton. Elon Musk is a globally known genius intellectual who has warned the world about the dangers of AI as well.
“AI anger That exactly what experts warned and Elon Musk.” – The Tech War Room
CONCLUSION:
I first became aware of the delusions of AI as a panacea cure all for our problems when I met my second wife. She had a habit of trusting her GPS system more than her future husband. We were on a trip to meet her family in southern Ohio when we got lost in downtown Cincinnati where her GPS system had us going around in circles among the city’s tallest buildings. A second faulty occurrence happened when the system was telling us to “Turn left!” at a T-intersection where left would have taken us into a rock wall adjacent to the Ohio River.
While these things happened in daylight where we could navigate the errors of our GPS system’s wrong ways, other people have not been so lucky as seen here:
“The GPS Said to Turn Right… Into a LAKE?! (Real Story)” – The Lost Horsepower
And here:
“AI Impact on Boeing 737 Max Crashes; Lessons Learned” – Ron Gerber with Angelbeat Seminars
So the fact of the matter is AI has already taken lives, even though that was not the intent of the system or those who invented the system.
Today we see people enjoying the ChatGPT website to help them with their work and homework. We see a sudden explosion of internet content created with other AI applications that allow us to make Baby Trump, Big Foot, Storm Troopers, and every other kind of character in humorous scenarios for laughter. We see our smart devices anticipating our every next word as we text our messages to others to save us from some keystrokes.
What we do not hear much about or discuss are scenarios where our power grid or our internet are shutdown, or our nuclear arsenal is launched against our will because of AI in the future. That is a serious problem.
Sometimes human nature allows us to get lulled into complicity. Years ago, when robots began to come online in manufacturing, we heard similar warnings and did not heed them. I witnessed two of our largest manufacturing plants in Illinois go from 5,000+ workers to less than 2,000 each in a matter of 20 years. Robots did welding, painting, and assembly, faster and better than humans. Today both plants are closed. When people lose their jobs, they do not have money for big ticket items like new cars and tractors!
Humans need the dignity of work. They need a purpose in their lives. They need the ability to do what they love and are good at to earn a livelihood. AI must not be allowed to take these things away from us.
One of the things this young computer engineering major said to my wife in Chicago that haunts me still, “I look for a whole bunch of suicides coming as AI eliminates people from the workforce. Even my job as a driver is being replaced by robocars already.” Irony!
© 2025 by Mark S. Schwendau
