Opinion: Nobody Knows Anything About AI—Least of All Donald Trump

Animated GIF by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty This piece is excerpted from its original home on Substack .

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We all need to very quickly have an opinion about AI , because it is going to change everything— for better or worse—although pretty much nobody you know and trust can actually explain how.

Therefore, we are reliant on people we don’t know and don’t trust.

This is an ideal situation for people trying to achieve industry and global hegemony.

They control the language, the issues, and the ultimate stakes of the controversy—in fact, they get to define the nature of the controversy.

AI might destroy humanity .

OK.

About this, we need to trust the theoretical assertions of the phenomenally inarticulate and personally peculiar people who run the industry, who have positioned themselves as the smartest people on earth, and who, it is certainly worth noting, are so rich they have long since lost any connection to the generalized humanity AI might destroy.

There is, they say, a 10% chance—or possibly a 30% chance—that AI will cause the extinction of the world.

Could that possibly be true? In this view, AI is advancing so quickly that today’s AI models will be able to create exponentially more superior AI models , altogether disintermediating human hands.

Such AI models will then be able to set their own tasks and define their own missions—possibly the end of humanity.

Or at least the end of the internet. (But wouldn’t that just put us back to the 1980s?) This is apparently called, opaquely, “recursive self-improvement.” The explanation anthropomorphizes AI models into actors who assign jobs to each other, plot strategies , and conceive grand plans like animals in a Disney movie.

You can see why Donald Trump thinks this is hogwash .