Jensen Huang, the man whose chips actually train the models, said it last week on CBS: 2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is, and I repeat, a 0% chance it’s going to be the end of the world. He called the extinction talk doomsday narratives not grounded in science. Scaring people, he said, is unnecessary and irresponsible. And did we really need him to tell us this? Have we become unblinking mouth breathers en masse?
Jensen Huang is building the future. The people screaming Skynet are making fan films.
I admit to a guilty pleasure: I like to mock doomsayers, chicken little people, hand wringers, and pearl clutchers. I see them gullible. China, God bless ‘em, kept its planes in the air when 1999 became 2000 because they knew—they knew—Y2K was theater. They have never lost a single slice of sleep over the latest climate sermon and they build coal plants like we make french fries. Whenever I want a reality check on mass hysteria, I look to the PRC and note whether they seem scared at all. I might hate their form of government, but I do admire their perspicacity.
Upon a time, once, as a Lyft driver, I picked up PhDs in Artificial Intelligence at LAX who told me, unprompted, how impossible Skynet is. Humans would have to fall asleep and then help it happen, and then do nothing as it happens. I wrote science fiction about AIs taking over the world five hundred years or so from now, but The Singularity in my story is not something an AI invents on its own. To wit… you cannot tell a model to invent cold fusion and watch it spit out blueprints. SuperGrok Plus is a search engine on steroids, not Leonardo da Vinci.
So my advice to people trying to block AI data centers is to stay home and watch television, and whatever you do, do not look at Nvidia. Those people are building a world where a tenth of a second is not a long time. We will live under the sea and in airlocks with their help. If you actually want to keep AIs from becoming killbots, baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and tell them to uphold the Golden Rule. Do unto others. Its better than Asimov’s three laws because its virtue does not reduce to a checklist.
