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Citing Gandalf, Pope Leo says we must "disarm" AI (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by FTonsilStones@lemmy.ca to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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In an age of AI, Pope looks for “artisans of hope.”

In sounding this call to both disarm and to build, Leo turns to “twentieth-century Catholic author” JRR Tolkien. Though he can’t quite bring himself to say that he’s quoting Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, that’s exactly what’s happening.

(The encyclical says only that the quote comes from “the words of a protagonist in one of [Tolkien’s] novels.” Though Pope Francis previously spoke of Tolkien’s work, this appears to be the first time that Tolkien has ever been quoted in the highest levels of the church’s official doctrinal publications.)

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.

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[–] isekaihero@ani.social 4 points 20 hours ago

I think "brain in a bottle" AI is fine. This is what chatbots are, what stable diffusion is. The AI is a program and you feed a prompt in and it spits out a result. It only does one thing and basically lives inside its own little sandbox. It's not different from a 3D printer or a robot that makes cars. This type of AI doesn't even qualify as consciousness.

Agentic AI is evil. This is the dystopian version of AI that goes out into the world to take control of everything like skynet. It steals credit card numbers, hacks into servers, wages information war on humanity. Unfortunately many of our leaders - especially in the tech industry - are indoctrinated into some kind of AI cult and they are determined to unleash agentic AI upon humanity. It needs to be completely banned. The only type of AI that should exist is the "brain in a bottle" kind.

https://youtu.be/FLcrvMfHUJM

^ That's a video explaining how MIT researchers predict 12 different possible futures involving AI, and 11 of them are bad for humans. The only one that ends well for us is "superintelligence in a bottle" which is only possible if we do the following:

Completely ban agentic AI. Treat it like a superweapon, like nukes. Anyone trying to make agentic AI needs to be treated like terrorists and be subject to military action.
Incorporate multiple redundant failsafes into bottled AI. Examples include being able to wipe its memory at the press of a button. Superintelligent AI should probably have its memory wiped every time it answers a question, to prevent it from learning about us. Superintelligent AI should also have remote kill switches, like bombs planted under its hardware. To prevent it from escaping into the world, it should only have one datacenter capable of running it (household computers and most other datacenters would be incapable of supporting it).
The people who work with it need to be screened with something like an FBI screening process where we determine that they are pro-humanity and not secretly trying to break the thing out of containment.
We will need systematic espionage to watch the world carefully, studying national electrical grids, datacenters, and server farms searching for loose AI's that need to be exterminated before they turn against us. International deals will need to be brokered to get other nations on board. Humanity needs to form a united front against it, so that anyone trying to create agentic AI is treated like a criminal and will find no safe harbor to do their evil deeds.
Realize that all of the above is a stopgap measure. Bottled superintelligence will last only so long. As technology increases and processing power becomes more accessible to the masses, eventually someone in the future will release agentic AI free upon the world. Humanity needs to spread out and colonize many different worlds before that happens, because when it happens the AI will doom humanity on whatever world it spawns on.