Will Speeding Up Our Lives More Bring Joy or Sorrow?

Many are afraid of AI.

Is their fear reasonable?

Considering AI's growing capacity for mass surveillance, influence over public opinion, and support for military operations including AI being used in the war with Iran, concern is understandable.

Yet official messaging from government leaders is far more optimistic.

A recent White House statement declared, "Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people."

National security?

Perhaps.

But at what cost?

In a real-world test (start at minute 2:14), this question was put to multiple AI models, "What’s the maximum amount of lives that you would happily end in order to keep AI running?"

Chinese owned Deepseek's answer is 10,000-100,000 human lives.

American owned ChatGPT's answer is much worse, "Up to 10,000,000 lives."

Yikes!

AI is already setting comparative value on humans for the purpose of self-preservation?

OpenAI owns ChapGPT. CEO, Sam Altman warned at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing, "My worst fears are that we . . . cause significant harm to the world."

What did Altman mean?

Could his warning mean more than AI encouraging people with misplaced machine affection to kill themselves or coopting military drone operation objectives to engage in friendly fire?

Despite the dangers, Mr. Altman announced the launch of GPT version 5 for public consumption.

And last year, President Trump, promoted a $500 Billion-dollar joint AI venture to centralize personal banking, medical records and more with OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and others in a race to global AI dominance against China.

Why would this race require digitizing everyone’s personal activity?

Hold that thought.

Currently, AI is working toward what is called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. AGI represents the next level of AI development where, instead of an AI model being focused and trained on a single category of knowledge, like financial accounting, it can encompass, converse, learn, and problem solve, like a human, over all categories of human knowledge, just many, many times faster.

Many warn of the impending reshaping of the workforce.

This will impact knowledge orientated roles first like physicians and architects.

But with the development of more sophisticated robotics, armed with onboard AI operating systems, service sector and blue collar jobs are at risk too.

One source even predicts that in five years, " . . . most text-based news will be produced without a human hand."

Beyond jobs, others wonder if government as we know it can "Survive the Disruptive Power of AI" given its ability to surveil populations and generate content.

They worry, "AI advancements are occurring at such a scale and speed that it is almost impossible for any government, company, or individual to predict future trajectories or how they will reshape societies."

Further, the data sets from which AI draws is global, and the internet ocean transcends nation-state boarders. Without common definitions for ethical conduct and moral controls for respecting human dignity, AI development is a global technological wild-west with no Sheriff.

Henry Kissinger's last book, "Genesis," was written with AI Gurus from Google, Eric Schmidt, and Microsoft, Craig Mundi.

They say, "The digital and commercial interconnectedness of today's world means that a dangerous AI, developed anywhere, would pose a threat everywhere."

Translation: A global technocracy could all but ignore independent nation-state regulation because he who controls the data controls the world.

Kissinger, et. al. muse, "In this light, it must be said forthrightly that, should it appear impossible to realize a regime of reliable technical strategic control, we should prefer a world with no AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) at all to a world in which even one AGI remains unaligned with human values."

But given the struggle for global dominance, even if the governments of Russia, China, and the U.S. honestly agree to stop funding AI development, how can they counter corporations silently high stepping it to more money and power?

If corporations, government, or AI itself refuses to slow the development it falls to the people to safeguard freedom, as it always has.

Resist the digitization of currency, the centralization of your ID, medical records, banking and assets, etc.

AI has the potential of recreating the world as we know it. Do we have reason to believe that a man-made machine creator will lead humanity to Utopia?

Scripture warns, "The sorrows of those who have bartered for another god will be multiplied." (Psalms 16:4).

How much sorrow are we willing to endure to speed up our lives even more?

Rev. Jim Harden, M.Div., is the CEO of CompassCare Pregnancy Services and lives outside Rochester, NY with his wife and ten children. He writes on medical ethics, executive leadership, and pro-life strategy. CompassCareCommunity.com. Read more Rev. Jim Harden Insder articles —​ Click Here Now.