Dystopian Artificial Intelligence Is Not Near, It Is Already Here

 by Dr.Sean Lin and Jacky Guan via The Epoch Times,

In November 2022, the release of an artificial intelligence (AI) online chatting program named ChatGPT shocked the world. This program is so “smart” that it delivers frighteningly human-like responses and seems to have very few flaws compared to previous versions. Not only do people treat it as a conversation companion, but they have also started to use this AI technology for a variety of tasks, such as completing homework, creating stunning images, writing poems, etc.

Using ChatGPT is like accessing a supercomputer’s brain, making this technology intriguing and exciting but also a bit scary and threatening. In 2014, Elon Musk warned that with AI, “we are summoning the demon,” but this threat could only become real when AI like ChatGPT could generate responses to questions that are indistinguishable from how a human would respond. This technology is so powerful that there now exists a widespread concern that the landscape of many industries will be transmuted by this advancement, including academia and health care.

Jobs that usually require a human touch, such as those in the fields of journalism and the service industry, are facing replacement and automation. We have long thought that the art of language stands at the pinnacle of human wisdom, yet AI is knocking right at its doorstep. It is challenging our uniqueness and intruding upon our lives.

AI Is Now Extremely Advanced and Capable

ChatGPT can basically chat about anything you want. From analyzing code for you to writing full-on essays and poems, this free online program describes itself as a computer program designed to “understand and respond to natural language inputs,” such as text conversations.

ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. The program is based on a set of technologies developed and used in programs that generate user-friendly responses. AI is something that needs to be taught how to think and respond using technology that functions like neural networks. This process involves feeding the AI mountains of information before it can process it, adapt, learn, create, and become intelligent.

ChatGPT uses the latest edition of GPT and is capable of generating a large amount of human-like text based on minimal input. It already processed an unimaginably large amount of data that enabled it to learn what to return to the user when asked a question. For example, if you asked ChatGPT to write you a poem, it would generate something like this:

“Beneath the starry sky so bright,

With gentle breeze and silver light,

I stand and gaze into the night,

And let my thoughts take flight.

The moon and stars above me shine,

Guiding me through the dark divine,

Reminding me of love and time,

And all the beauty that is mine.

The world is vast, yet small and grand,

A mystery waiting to be scanned,

With secrets hidden in the sand,

And stories waiting to be canned.

So let me stand beneath the stars,

And let my soul and spirit soar,

For in this beauty, free from bars,

I find my heart forevermore.”

Isn’t this poem impressive? With the tremendous volume of data feeding ChatGPT, it can process our poems, analyze them, and produce a new poem in seconds. And the result could be different each time, even if you write the same command for it.

ChatGPT can also do the same with essays, entire chunks of code, and much more. It can have a casual conversation with you and knows how to adjust its jargon to even explain quantum computing in a way seventh graders can understand it.

It is understandable why many are instantly attracted to the program, as it can seemingly solve many issues and offers a significant shortcut for completing tasks. The chat is free and works extremely well; what could go wrong with this technology, except for being a teacher’s nightmare?

ChatGPT Can’t Be Held Accountable for Its Work

Recently, scientists have tested the limitations of ChatGPT and instructed it to write components of research articles that were later published in distinguished scientific journals like Nature. After the news broke that an AI was able to write research papers, it became the epicenter of a hot debate still shaking the community today.

Pro-AI arguments see technology like ChatGPT as the next step in human advancement.

It would make even science more efficient, reduce human labor, and make life easier.

The other side of the argument is that there is no way to hold artificial intelligence accountable for its work. If the program reaches the wrong conclusions or its algorithms aren’t mature enough, how can the program take responsibility for it?

The accountability issue is not just about when things go wrong. The use of AI-generated text without proper citation “could be considered plagiarism,” says Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the family of Science journals. For that reason, a few articles have already been published with ChatGPT listed as one of the authors, while publishers are hastening the push for regulation.

In fact, after papers were published in Nature with ChatGPT as a co-author, the editors-in-chief for Nature and Science concluded that “ChatGPT doesn’t meet the standard for authorship” because such a title carries accountability and liability to it, something out of the question for AI.

However, the core issue behind the authorship dispute is that journal editors are no longer certain about how much or to what extent the article was generated by ChatGPT. Scientific experiments likely still require studies conducted by humans. But authors of review articles that attribute ChatGPT likely did so because it played a significant role in the writing process.

Some biomedical researchers have used ChatGPT to conduct drug development research and have been able to identify potential drug chemicals that were missed in the past. With the help of AI, a new age of explosive advancements in the biomedical field is sure to be ushered in.

However, how will researchers know when AI data become misleading? Will anyone dare to challenge the algorithms behind this data? These are not the only questions we face today, because AI seems to also be taking over health care, either functioning as a robot or through an app.

Artificial Intelligence Should Not Replace Health Care Workers

Some clinics have been exploring the usage of ChatGPT to conduct patient consultations. Mental health clinics even obtained better performance outcomes when they adopted ChatGPT to take over consultations with their patients, with many patients not even realizing that they were talking to a robot.

AI could become the next nurse or physician’s assistant that helps you recover after an accident, or that performs the key incisions on your next operation. The future of health care could transform rapidly, as people might not even have to go to the doctor’s office at all with the combination of AI and telemedicine. All you have to do is open an app on your phone and talk with a chatbot, tell it about your symptoms, and it will curate a prescription for you. But there is a level of trust developed during face-to-face interactions that is missing from this AI model.

AI robots using a GPT can also be used to treat high-risk patients such as those with mental disorders or in rehab by replacing the doctor when monitoring the patients and administering treatment, conducting checkups, evaluating risks, and taking action if needed. However, the same accountability question arises when we implement AI into the medical field.

Here, the accountability question is more concerning, because who will be held accountable when the patient experiences complications from the wrong medicine or the wrong dose? You can’t blame the doctor because he was just following the AI. You can’t blame the AI because it’s a program. In the end, who will be held accountable?

For people to feel safe around AI, strict liability rules need to be imposed to restrict the freedom these things have. However, if these programs are to improve, they need to have more freedom to operate and learn. Although this appears to be a catch-22, the core issue is whether humans should let AI and robots take care of them.

With the capability of AI increasing exponentially, why are medical schools even training their students, and for what? In the future, if AI loses power or malfunctions, would licensed doctors still know how to treat patients without the help of AI? How dependent will we become on AI?

Human Beings Are Accelerating Toward a Crossroad

AI has a lot of potential and will inevitably become a part of our future. However, allowing AI to play a more significant role in medicine and health care will give it more power to influence our understanding of health and well-being. It may even allow AI to alter our bodies.

If AI becomes ubiquitous, will it make humans dumber and reduce us in all aspects? Over time, children might just talk to their chatbot tablets instead of their parents, people might forget how to alleviate symptoms of things as common as colds, and basic tasks like writing an essay might become things of the past. This will inevitably undermine humans and affect our development. When technology becomes so advanced that we can command robots with our minds, might we one day devolve into those aliens with lanky limbs and inflated heads?

When AI begins to mimic human thinking and presents human-like language, we begin to see the reality of the human brain laid bare: They are essentially machines that process information. When computers gather enough of a volume of data, they can engage a sophisticated algorithm to generate human-like thinking and response. The more people use it, the more the ChatGPT AI will be trained to become more human-like, possibly eventually becoming wiser than mankind.

So what makes us humans unique?

We have witnessed supercomputers defeat the human champions of chess and Go games.

Now, AI has arrived in the fields of which people are genuinely proud—fields that revolve around creation, emotion, human interaction, artistic expression, and so on.

This is a critical time when human beings need to think more deeply about where our wisdom comes from. Are our inspirations simply born of an accumulation of myriad data? AI and computers get their data from human input or via trawling the depths of seas of data. Do we, too, get our “original” ideas this way? Why do people get inspiration and creative ideas that seemingly have nothing to do with their prior experience and knowledge?

The threat of AI and supercomputers is not just about losing more jobs. And it goes beyond reducing human thinking capability. The fundamental threat of uncontrolled AI technology is that it cuts off human beings’ connection with our creator. Through technological advancement, human beings are constructing digital gods for people to worship. Using AI or robots to improve life may be the sweet side of this drug, but using AI to replace human thinking is the darker side.

The pressing issue here is how to safeguard our human spirituality. How do we maintain our connection to the divine? Human beings are not just flesh and bones, like how a machine is simply composed of mechanical parts.

The development of AI technologies like ChatGPT is the tipping point for a long-standing issue we’ve been facing—the (dis)connection with God and the true meaning of our human lives as we replace that connection. We’re faced with a choice: Do we keep falling into this bottomless technological pit, or should we return to a traditional way where human beings maintain their connection with the divine?

https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/dystopian-artificial-intelligence-not-near-it-already-here

US Mulls Plan To Give Ukraine Thousands Of Previously Seized Iranian Weapons

 Via The Cradle,

The US army is analyzing sending thousands of alleged Iranian weapons and over a million rounds of ammunition to Ukraine as part of Washington’s latest bid to fuel the war against Russia.

According to unnamed US and European officials that spoke with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the arsenal would include over 5,000 assault rifles, 1.6 million rounds of small arms ammunition, a small number of antitank missiles, and more than 7,000 proximity fuses that were recently seized in the Gulf of Oman allegedly on their way to Yemen.

While this cache of weapons is small compared to what western nations have sent Ukraine over the past year, Pentagon officials reportedly see in the delivery a symbolic punishment for Iran supplying Russia with drones – a claim both Tehran and Moscow deny.

"It’s a message to take weapons meant to arm Iran’s proxies and flip them to achieve our priorities in Ukraine, where Iran is providing arms to Russia," one US official told the WSJ.

However, transferring weapons from one conflict to another remains a legal challenge for the White House, as the UN arms embargo on Iran requires western powers to destroy, store, or get rid of the seized weapons.

US President Joe Biden could presumably overcome this legal obstacle "by crafting an executive order, or working with Congress to empower the US to seize the weapons under civil forfeiture authorities and send them to Ukraine," the WSJ claims.

"What change can this make to war? … They’ve been sending much heavier weapons," Nasr al-Din Amir, Yemen’s Deputy Information Minister, told the US outlet about Washington’s plans. Since the start of the NATO-instigated war in Ukraine, Washington and its North Atlantic allies have been depleting their weapons stocks to give Kiev a fighting chance against Moscow’s forces.

During a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Monday, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that "the current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production." Western leaders recently tried to convince Latin American nations to donate their weapon stocks to Ukraine in their desperate bid to counter Russia, but their suggestion was immediately shot down.

"We are not with either side. We are for peace," said Colombian President Gustavo Petro last month. Similarly, his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Saliva told Biden during a meeting at the White House: "Brazil is a country of peace. At this moment, we need to find those who want peace, a word that has so far been used very little."

"I don’t think sending weapons to prolong a conflict has support in Latin America," Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard told the Financial Times. Argentina also followed a similar line when a spokesperson of the defense ministry confirmed that Buenos Aires "will not cooperate with the war."

Russia has warned the US and its NATO allies that continuing to send weapons to Ukraine risks involving them in the conflict directly.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/thousands-iranian-weapons-seized-us-navy-may-be-given-ukraine

Chinese spies co-opted local private investigators, federal agents for info on dissidents

 As US officials remain on high alert for spy balloons in the skies over North America, Chinese government operatives have already tapped into a network of local private investigators and federal agents to illegally obtain intelligence on the ground, according to a flurry of federal indictments.

Over the past few years, indictments filed against US-based private detectives allege that some have traded on their federal law enforcement connections to obtain classified documents and private information on political dissidents living in the US and targeted by the Chinese Communist Party.

In some cases, the private detectives offered their contacts in federal agencies wads of cash but they also got by with gifts of expensive cigars and a good bottle of tequila, according to a federal indictment unsealed in 2022.

Derrick Taylor, a California-based private investigator who used to work as a federal agent with the US Dept of Homeland Security, allegedly asked an unnamed co-conspirator for information on “immigration status” for an unnamed dissident who lived in the US in July 2021, according to the indictment filed in Brooklyn federal court.

Derrick Taylor, a California-based private investigator who used to work with the US Dept of Homeland Security, allegedly asked an unnamed co-conspirator for information on an unnamed Chinese dissident in the US in 2021, according to an indictment.

The Gavel

Taylor, who worked for 25 years for the Department of Homeland Security, had also claimed to work as a “security specialist” for Tesla CEO Elon Musk on his company web site.

He is alleged to have destroyed evidence and lied to investigators when confronted with claims that he accessed and distributed sensitive information from a restricted federal database related to dissidents living in the US. The data included their passport information, residences, flight records, and photographs, according to the court documents.

When Taylor contacted an unnamed government agent to obtain passport information about one dissident’s passport and status in the US, he allegedly gave the agent, known in court records as “Co-conspirator 2” the dissident’s birth date and asked for his “status and passport departure.”

This “service station” in Manhattan’s Chinatown is one of 100-plus law enforcement offices set up around the world by the People’s Republic of China, reportedly with “sinister” purposes such as spying on the Chinese diaspora.

William Farrington

“‘Is there a quick way that I can check if some guy’s departed to China?'” asked Taylor.

“The same day, CC2 responded, ‘He was admitted into the US until 11/26/2021 with a B2 Visa.'” Taylor responded, “‘Thank you brother! Do you smoke cigars or what’s your favorite tequila.'”

The co-conspirator declined the offer, according to court records.

Taylor did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday, but vigorously denied the allegations last year, according to court records.

Taylor has denied all allegations against him.

DBM Private Investigator

He was indicted along with Craig Miller, a longtime federal agent who works in DHS’s Emergency Relief Operations in Minneapolis. Miller was accused of scuttling an investigation when he allegedly destroyed text messages in June, 2022 between him and Taylor, according to court records. Miller, who faces 20 years in prison, changed his plea to guilty in November. Sentencing in the case has been scheduled for May.

Three others operatives — Fan “Frank” Liu, 62, of Jericho, New York, Matthew Ziburis, a 49-year-old from Oyster Bay and Qiang “Jason” Sun, 40, of China — were previously indicted. They are accused of stalking and spying on US-based dissidents on behalf of the Chinese government.

According to court papers, Miller admitted under questioning that he provided the sensitive information from a restricted government database to Taylor in exchange for a gift card. Taylor allegedly shared the information with a “co-conspirator” who was working with Liu.

The Chinese “spy” balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4.

CHASE DOAK/AFP via Getty Images

In addition to private investigators, federal agents have targeted Chinese spies engaged in Operation Fox Hunt, a program spearheaded by Chinese leader Xi Jinping beginning in 2014 to crack down on dissidents abroad.

“From in or about October 2016 through in or about May 2017, Sun Hoi Ying … hired private investigators in the United States to investigate Operation Fox Hunt targets, including a US citizen who previously worked in the PRC [People’s Republic of China], worked at a PRC government-owned company and was subsequently accused by the PRC government or embezzlement,” a February 2022 indictment reads.

“During the time that Sun was collecting information about Victim-1 for the PRC government, Victim-1’s daughter (Victim-2), a US citizen who was pregnant at the time, was held against her will in the PRC for approximately eight months.”

Federal agents targeted Chinese spies engaged in Operation Fox Hunt, a 2014 program spearheaded by Chinese leader Xi Jinping (above) to crack down on dissidents abroad.

Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images

Many of the Chinese operatives work out of “police stations” set up in urban centers around the world, including New York City. Last year, The Post revealed that a local charity on an IRS blacklist was running one such police station in Chinatown.

The non-profit America ChangLe Association NY Inc. owns and operates the “service station” located above a noodle shop on the third floor of 107 East Broadway on the Lower East Side, according to public filings.

Last year, the IRS yanked the group’s tax-exempt status for its failure to submit tax filings for three straight years, according to public records.

The Manhattan station is part of a web of more than 100 such law enforcement offices set up around the world by the People’s Republic of China, ostensibly to help Chinese nationals renew their government-issued identification and drivers’ licenses.

But the stations have more “sinister” purposes, such as spying on the Chinese diaspora for the Chinese Communist Party, according to a recent whistle-blower report.

“Openly labeled as overseas police service stations … they contribute to ‘resolutely cracking down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese,’” according to a September 2022 report by Safeguard Defenders, a Madrid-based human rights group that documents Chinese repression around the world.

https://nypost.com/2023/02/15/chinas-spies-have-used-local-private-investigators-for-years-to-watch-dissidents/

The Plot To Silence A Fauci Critic

 by Charlie Tidmarsh via RealClear Wire,

On Jan. 19, joint reporting from The Intercept and The Nation made public a collection of newly unredacted emails between Anthony Fauci, recently retired National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and a select few virologists, in which the group discusses the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab – specifically, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

The hook in the reporting by investigative journalist Jimmy Tobias, beyond its illuminating document cache, is his observation that three of those virologists went on to publish a March 21, 2020, paper in Nature Medicine entitled “The proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2,” in which the authors asserted “We do not believe that any laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” The emails unearthed by Tobias, however, show a far more conflicted view behind the scenes, with one of the paper’s primary authors writing in an email to the group on Feb. 8, 2020: “I believe that publishing something that is open-ended could backfire at this stage.”

Nonetheless, the paper enjoyed a cushy institutional reception a month later. Fauci endorsed it in an April press conference; Collins wrote a blog post promoting it; ABC News ran a story using the study’s conclusions to dismiss lab-origin conjectures as conspiracy theories. It is now one of the most-read scientific papers in history and has been cited over 2,700 times.

Whether a product of cynicism or mere panic, this episode serves as a reminder – at a moment in which we seem cautiously willing to reappraise our pandemic response – of just how much power a small number of scientists had over the direction of our early COVID conversations. In this way, it echoes the story of Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who has just written two essays for Tablet and the National Post urging that we not forget some of our gravest pandemic missteps.

Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics, and health policy research at Stanford University. He holds an MD and PhD from Stanford and directs the university’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. He first gained national prominence in early 2020, after publishing a few COVID seroprevalence studies in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties. These studies attempted to measure SARS-CoV-2 infection rates using blood antibody tests; both concluded that COVID had already infected orders of magnitude more people than was being reported at the time in those regions. The takeaway of these findings, disputed as they often were, was that COVID wasn’t as deadly as the public was being told.

Informed by this data, and remembering the United States’ pre-COVID pandemic playbook, Bhattacharya drafted the Great Barrington Declaration at a conference hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research, or AIER. This one-page open letter, written with Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, argued that the U.S. was getting its lockdown strategy horribly wrong. Local authorities should adopt a “focused protection” paradigm, they advised, which would have meant marshaling public health resources predominantly for those most at risk from the virus while encouraging those at less risk to resume normal activities. Their intent was to promote a discussion of a strategy that would minimizing ancillary harm wrought by indiscriminate closures and mandates. It was written and revised over the course of a weekend and published on Oct. 5, 2020.

On Oct. 15, AIER writer Phillip Magness reported that in only 10 days, the Great Barrington Declaration had garnered over 500,000 signatures globally, with representatives from almost every country on Earth. Some 25,000 of these signatures came from medical practitioners, and 9,000 from health scientists, such as Nobel-winning chemist Michael Levitt.

Attacks on Bhattacharya and the Declaration came almost immediately. On Oct. 9, the Great Barrington Declaration website was targeted by a hoax signature campaign initiated on Twitter by leftist British journalist Nafeez Ahmed, which was then reported on credulously in multiple news outlets. Ahmed also speculated for the Byline Times that the Declaration was a Koch-funded piece of propaganda.

Perhaps most consequential were the efforts at suppression from more institutional figures. Collins, in an Oct. 8, 2020, email to Fauci obtained by AIER via a Freedom of Information Act request, labeled Bhattacharya, a tenured professor of medicine, a “fringe epidemiologist” while calling for a “quick and devastating public takedown,” verbiage reiterated in an Oct. 14 Washington Post article quoting him. This back-and-forth between two of the nation’s most powerful health officials resulted in a chummy exchange with two writers – Gregg Gonsalves at The Nation and Matt Reynolds at Wired – who had just published their own Bhattacharya criticisms. One of the final emails in the unclassified collection shows Fauci’s chief of staff, Greg Folkers, supplying his boss with seven anti-Declaration opinion pieces.

The U.K. attempted its own version of this institutional discrediting effort. In an August 2021 piece for Spiked, Bhattacharya quoted Jeremy Farrar, director of the London-based health NGO the Wellcome Trust, as having said that political strategist Dominic Cummins “wanted to run an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and others opposed to blanket COVID-19 restrictions.” Farrar was also a member of the small group discussing COVID origins in the weeks leading up to the publication of “The proximate origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

Finally, there is the most recent revelation, published by Bari Weiss as an installment of the ongoing “Twitter Files.” According to an internal document supplied to Weiss by Elon Musk soon after his purchase of the social media giant, Bhattacharya’s personal Twitter account was placed on a “Trends Blacklist.” This is a throttling mechanism designed to limit the reach of a user’s posts, and it was implemented the very day Bhattacharya joined the website and sent his first tweet – a link to the Great Barrington Declaration homepage.

As of this writing, the Declaration boasts over 936,000 signatures and has been translated into 44 languages. Bhattacharya continues to communicate his message on those outlets that will publish him. He spoke with Weiss at a forum hosted by the Free Press last month detailing the most personal affront he’s dealt with over the last two years: the chilly indifference from Stanford University. “Stanford handled it very, very poorly,” he said. “And they sent signals to me in the Summer of 2020 that if I just stayed silent, they would leave me alone.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/plot-silence-fauci-critic