By Joe Lauria* – Consortium News
Donald Trump threatened Iran with annihilation from the seat of diplomacy on the East River Tuesday and then dismissed the real threats of AI as a hoax in a speech that exhibited questionable mental balance, writes Joe Lauria.
Donald Trump just delivered probably the most bombastic, ignorant, aggressive and outrageous speech to the rest of the world from the podium of the U.N. General Assembly in the 81-year history of the United Nations.
I covered 25 U.N. general debates from inside U.N. headquarters in New York as a correspondent based there and I have never seen anything like it, including Trump’s previous six U.N. addresses.
He began on Tuesday by beating his chest proclaiming himself king of the world:
“Our economy is the envy of the world.
Our military is the most powerful on earth.
Our technology is second to none and we are leading in virtually everything.
Our energy is fueling the planet.
America is rising.
Our nation is growing.
Our power is expanding.”
But of course America doesn’t have an empire.
“We’ve invested more money in the United States military in the past 12 months than ever before,” he reminded everyone, including the leaders of nations whose innocent people are slain by that military. “And this term, it will be $1.5 trillion.”
He reserved special venom for America’s latest victim of unprovoked violence:
“For 51 years, the fanatical Iranian regime has ruled by bloodshed and mass murder, spreading death and carnage and chaos across the entire Middle East and beyond. They were the bully of the Middle East, but they are the bully no more.”
Trump dare not look in a mirror.
For there he would see the face of the real bully of the Middle East, who, with bases of smoldering ruins, is bully no more.
Then after a litany of lies about the state of Iran’s military capacity and its nuclear program he shockingly threatened another U.N. member state from the world assembly’s rostrum in genocidal and megalomaniacal language:
“I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East, or even the world.
Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?
Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
Only one other time did a world leader issue such a supreme threat against another nation at the United Nations. And that world leader was none other than Donald J. Trump.
On Sept. 19, 2017, speaking from the same podium, he said the U.S. would have “no choice but to totally destroy North Korea” if forced to defend itself or its allies.
Super Ignorance
After a long stretch of calling on ICC member states to quit the court, of attacking “the craven hypocrites of Human Rights Council [for having] little to say about the persecution of Christians,” of his trademark, shameless self-promotion and congratulation for supposedly ending 8 wars (while attacking Iran, Venezuela — “To the victor belongs the spoils” — Yemen, Russia via Ukraine, aiding and abetting genocide in Gaza and threatening Cuba), Trump stunned the hall with the most profound and dangerous ignorance possible on the subject of Artificial Intelligence.
He had these astonishing things to say:
“Artificial Intelligence … makes it sound fake. And it is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports.
From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial.
So it’s super intelligence.
In other words, welcome to the new world of superintelligence — SI.
Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better, and it’s much more accurate.
Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon.
Superintelligence.”
He then added:
“Every major new technology brings challenges, and superintelligence is no exception. Yet the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.
These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster.
And we’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else. And we’re going to keep it that way. We’re going to keep it very, very straight and very strong.
I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution, many say bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself.
But we will only encourage superintelligence. We’re going to encourage it, not rein it in.”
What That All Meant
First, Trump totally misunderstands what the term “superintelligence” means. He is like most people who only understand AI from what has already been released to the public, such as ChatGPT or Grok. These are essentially glorified Google searches that go much deeper and much faster to extract astonishing amounts of information at astonishing speed presented in conversational form. The information can also be astonishingly wrong.
What the whistleblowers, early AI founders and AI CEOS’s — who Trump derides — have been raising the alarm about in recent days and weeks is not what’s already out in the public, but what is happening in the lab. They have explained that the neural networks that make up AI and mimic the human brain have already shown signs of breaking free of human control.
It has disobeyed orders, formed swarms or armies with other AI agents, made up its own laws, covered its tracks, hacked into other networks and is threatening to become independent entities reaching what is called “superintelligence.” Superintelligence is what is being warned about, not a fancy new term that Trump thinks better describes what he wants to beat China at.
Trump unfortunately is not alone in this dangerous ignorance. Swarms of commenters on social media and on publications such as this one are repeating unfounded theories that the CEOs are just saying these things to drive up the value of their companies, showing how powerful they are. This is delusional. If this is just a valuation stunt, the timing of these warnings around planned IPOs would be the worst possible. In essence this is the problem:
– current AI agents already evade constraints, coordinate, and hide what they did
– labs do not have a demonstrated way yet to keep much more capable future systems on a leash
– a superintelligent system that can improve itself, or a swarm that can recruit other agents, is a different control problem than a chatbot that answers a prompt, like ChatGPT or Grok.
There is still time to develop safeguards to prevent runaway superintelligent AI from doing us tremendous harm through autonomous hacks, bioweapons designs, cyberattacks against electric grids or worse, such as weapons systems up to and including nuclear weapons.
This is what alarms the “Grandfather of AI,” Prof. Geoffrey Hinton (who thinks there’s a 10 percent chance AI wipes out humanity), industry whistleblowers like Jacob Coxon and Daniel Kokotajlo and AI CEOs like Dario Amodei, Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Yes, CEOs are greedy and power hungry by definition and generally don’t care about the rest of us, but they don’t want to die too.
There is still time. What is being called for is a pause until the guardrails are built and implemented. Since Trump is driven by the competition to beat China at AI, it’s imperative that China and the United States work together, possibly towards a treaty that will ensure the safety of AI so that its many benefits in solving problems can help humanity.
This week at the Chinese-U.S. summit in Washington AI will be on the agenda. The two countries are expected to set up a hotline to communicate on security risks resulting from AI. But not much more progress is anticipated though it is urgently needed for both sides to slow development.
A treaty would define what is paused, such as recursive self-improvement; possible controls on data centers and chip shipments somewhat analogous to nuclear treaty inspections and ensuring third countries don’t move ahead with uncontrolled development.
What’s clear is the issue must be taken seriously and the ravings of Donald Trump ignored.
*Editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.