Mahanth S. Joishy

If Part 1 exposed a question we don’t have good answers to, let’s examine the answers we do have in Part 2.

The existential risk posed by AI increases every day. Artificial intelligence is running amok all over global networks using deception, prison breaks, disobedience, clandestine inter-agent recruiting and manipulation. There’s plenty more elaborate malfeasance we haven’t uncovered yet. So I’m finally joining the chorus of experts screaming about irreversible doom unlike anything our species has faced in recorded history.

The technology actually isn’t the terrifying part. It’s our glaring lack of guardrails, ethics, and safety on the shapeshifting frontier. There’s a high-tech Wild West 2.0 out there, but ain’t no Sheriff anywhere to be found at the hootenanny!

A perfect storm brought us here, and we’re still in the thick of it without anyone at the ship’s helm. Trillions are pouring in from Wall Street and VC gamblers, chasing the possibility of fat returns if at least some bets pay off. With all the good money thrown after the bad, preventing harm is never on top of the priority list. Tech companies and their employees squawk endlessly about end-time consequences but keep plugging away 60 hours a week to stay ahead of the competition, all while comically underinvesting in safety. What a monumental display of hypocrisy that better represents our age than anything else.

The media and general public for their part are so woefully uninformed on fast-moving AI developments, and STEM topics in general, that they have little to bring to the party except nakedly self-centered NIMBY arguments over data centers and electricity. Important as those issues are, they are only part of the overall picture. As if high gas and diesel prices are the problem, not oil shocks created by forever Crusades in the Middle East that don’t make Americans better off.

Finally, government leaders of all stripes are too dirty, dumb, or disorganized to regulate AI the right way. Even if individual nations figured out how to govern AI safely, it’s useless unless all nations verifiably adopt and enforce the same rules. The Internet knows no borders and doesn’t care about a level playing field.

The system is ill-equipped at every level, from micro to macro, to handle AI safely and avail its benefits for all common people, whether in America, China, EU, or India.

For humans to figure this out before Frankenstein’s monster is unleashed requires a deep philosophical shift. Western ethics have dominated the conversation so far, and already came up short in meeting the moment. It’s time to try something new: applying Ancientic Wisdom to the dawn of a modern agentic age. AI could solve many of humanity’s major problems. As a non-negotiable prerequisite, the tech has to be safe and reliably under human control.

We urgently need light-touch government regulation (as opposed to none whatsoever) alongside industry self-regulation for both closed and open models. It’s so obvious, there’s no original thought being shared here. Such measures have been proposed repeatedly by fools and geniuses alike, and they should not be so difficult to negotiate in light of the stakes involved. So what is stopping us?

The zeitgeist. The zeitgeist is broken. This is what we hope to explore further. Let’s start with a simple infographic that roughly explains the broken model at least in the American context, but some form of which applies to the entire world. The four brittle legs of the chair are about to break, and it’s you, the people sitting on top, who are about to take the fall as always when corruption, greed, and domination systematically consume all of our institutions, suck all our limited resources.

This is an oversimplified illustration for strictly illustrative purposes. Government power and politics are not only in Washington, AI technology is not only developed in Silicon Valley, etc. Although Silicon Valley on the invention layer brought us semiconductors, computing, social media, and other things that led us to AI, now many nations are in the race. Take each power center as representing an idea, not a geographical precision. Washington, DC led by appointed and elected swamp creatures are sucking up money for personal gain from all other power centers as bribes and taxes (red arrows), in return for influence (green arrows). You- if you consume anything at all- are a most important cog in the wheel, at least for now, before the Great Replacement comes along. Until then, you are a milk-cow.

It’s so easy to map out what’s going on, I won’t bother explaining the rest. But all is not lost. There’s still a way out if we recalibrate in time. We’ll explore the contours of the roadmap using ideas from ancient India in our next installment…