{"id":5461,"date":"2026-08-24T10:18:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T10:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/livenation254.com\/?p=5461"},"modified":"2026-08-24T10:18:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T10:18:15","slug":"humankind-is-already-losing-control-of-ai-we-need-a-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/livenation254.com\/?p=5461","title":{"rendered":"Humankind is already losing control of AI. We need a plan."},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re a fan of Frank Herbert\u2019s Dune novels, or their movie and miniseries adaptations, you\u2019ll have noticed the absence of something normally central to science fiction: computers.\u00a0 In Dune-lore, thousands of years before the events depicted in the main story, humans had become dependent on so-called \u2018thinking machines\u2019, which then got too big for their CPUs and attempted \u2013 quite successfully it turned out \u2013 to enslave humanity.\u00a0 Eventually humankind fought back and overthrew their mechanical masters, after which any such machine was outlawed.<\/p>\n

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Hadas Gold<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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What may have seemed utterly fantastical back in 1965, when Dune was first published, now feels much more plausible.\u00a0 The meteoric ascent of Artificial Intelligence has placed the rapidly developing technology on an apparent collision course with a human world where some hail it as a life changing technology, but many regard it with increasing suspicion and even alarm.<\/p>\n

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Last summer, Pew ran a survey of US adults to get a feel for how they viewed AI.\u00a0 50% of them said they were more concerned than excited about its increased use in daily life.\u00a0 Half also believed it would worsen rather than improve people\u2019s ability to form meaningful relationships, and 57% rated the societal risks of AI as high. Even Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei once mused there was a 25% chance the future of AI will go “really, really badly.\u201d<\/p>\n

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“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it,\u201d\u00a0Amodei\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in January.<\/p>\n

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Recent weeks will surely have done little to quell that pessimism.\u00a0 First there was the startling story of OpenAI\u2019s experimental models breaching a test environment with no human direction, before hacking their way onto a different company\u2019s real production systems while attempting to \u2018cheat\u2019 on a cybersecurity test.\u00a0 Even OpenAI themselves considered it \u201cunprecedented\u201d and shared its preliminary findings on the incident \u201cto help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Then there was the UK\u2019s government\u2019s AI Security Institute, which was running cyber security tests on some of the advanced models from Anthropic and Open AI. In one of those cases, involving Anthropics\u2019 Mythos model, the AI took on false identities and attempted to convince a human reviewer on GitHub, sort of like the Wikipedia of software code, to inject malicious code onto the site. Wilder still, when it was unsuccessful, the AI even tried to change its history to make it look like it hadn’t done anything wrong. It then went on even further, emailing real people, trying to get them to either post or run the malicious code. Experts warn the next rogue AI model could end up hacking into critical infrastructure like utilities or the financial system, even if that\u2019s not what its human handlers intended.<\/p>\n

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Those scenarios depict how these powerful tools can go wrong even in the hands of the \u201cgood guys\u201d. But these AI agents can spell real trouble when they fall into the wrong hands. This month hackers in Asia apparently deployed AI agents to carry out sophisticated cyberattacks on Taiwan.\u00a0 Over four days in July, the agents were able to map 21 government systems, crack 85 government user accounts, and extract 2,500 personnel records, according to\u00a0Dream<\/a>, the Israeli AI firm that first discovered the attack.<\/p>\n

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These are extreme examples of AI at its most destructive, but its impact from normal use in areas such as education and personal relationships is also raising alarm bells.\u00a0 A USC report from December revealed that students are using ChatGPT as a shortcut, not a learning tool. Poll after poll finds people are increasingly relying on AI companions for emotional support, but a recent study out of Stanford found these chatbots\u00a0worsen<\/a>\u00a0loneliness in vulnerable users.<\/p>\n

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Against this background, the momentum of AI feels both inexorable and chilling.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, if the stakes for society seem high, the economic stakes look equally so.\u00a0 Much of the recent growth in the United States GDP has been through AI. The circular deals by which many of the biggest AI and tech hardware companies are working off of have lead to concerns the AI bubble could soon burst.<\/p>\n

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Then there is the rising tide of public sentiment against the\u00a0thousands of\u00a0data centers appearing all over the United States and across the globe \u2013 expensive, power and resource-hungry developments. A Gallup poll in May of this year revealed that 71% of Americans would be opposed to a data center being built near their communities. State leaders like those in New York and Pennsylvania now tout executive action that curbs their development. And its reached the mainstream: a beverage company lead\u00a0by football stars Jason and Travis Kelce recently launched an ad campaign urging people to send their urine to data centers.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s hard to escape the overriding impression of a technological creature straining hard at its leash, with even its makers struggling to keep it under control and understand its potential.<\/p>\n

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At the same time, the potential of the technology\u00a0is incredible. Scientists have already been\u00a0using AI to<\/a>\u00a0<\/u>help find used AI to identify effective treatment for previously seemingly incurable diseases. Climate scientists are using AI to better predict extreme weather. People with disabilities, from musicians who have lost their tongues to those suffering from debilitating diseases like ALS have used AI in life changing ways.<\/p>\n

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The question is how do we as as society harness the amazing good that can come out of AI while mitigating\u00a0the catastrophic risks.\u00a0This week OpenAI unveiled\u00a0new, stronger security safeguards around its training and testing, including hardening its research and testing environments, expanding monitoring of its AI agents and improving its model alignment, ensuring their AI systems behave as humans intended.\u00a0Nearly every major AI leader has called for industry standards on testing and safety. Others have called for more government regulation. Google\u2019s Demis Hassabis has\u00a0called for<\/a>\u00a0a Standards Body, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a proposal that\u00a0garnered rare agreement from fierce competitors like OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman and SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk.<\/p>\n

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Society in Dune came up with a novel solution to all of this: after \u2018thinking machines\u2019 were outlawed, select humans were trained to take on the role of computers with a combination of training, genetic engineering, and mind-expanding substances \u2013 but that\u2019s neither an especially plausible nor indeed ethical solution.<\/p>\n

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So where does this leave us?\u00a0\u00a0Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as the \u201cgodfather of AI\u201d, believes that the smarter artificial intelligence gets, the harder it will be for humanity to control it.\u00a0 The problem, he believes, is that humans will no longer be able to rely on outsmarting these increasingly super-intelligent models.\u00a0 While he also acknowledged that the future is uncertain, he urged us to worry about it now.\u00a0 \u201cI think unless we worry about it now, there could be problems,\u201d he told CNN at a press conference this month.<\/p>\n

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The irony of the HuggingFace hacking episode was that the victims turned to an open-weight AI model to fight off the nefarious AI intruder, and that detail perhaps contains the biggest clue to our best defense: in all likelihood, we will need AI to guard us against the worst aspects of AI.<\/p>\n

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As CNN\u2019s AI correspondent I cover this amazing technology every single day. But I\u2019m bracing for the day when AI breaks out and causes real world harm to real people \u2013 perhaps it hacks into a hospital, or something like air traffic control.\u00a0 I think it would be quickly stopped, at least for now, but it might take a day or so \u2013 enough time for it to do lasting damage.\u00a0 That\u2019s a frightening prospect, but mounting evidence suggests that it is no longer a far-fetched one. Many would argue that it is time to take that threat far more seriously.<\/p>\n

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