The future of AI

Off Topic
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I’m not concerned about AI in as much as it is a tool that helps humanity. In many ways it is already there. It is paying huge dividends in medical research and other related fields and we can see even within the architectural world (and even within SketchUp) we already have felt its influence in a positive way. My oldest son is an English major and AI is already a huge disrupter within that field.

All of this is well and good and I 100% support the use of AI and its proliferation.

My only real concern is that as the technology progresses we are approaching a level of intelligence with these things which may eventually lead to them becoming self aware. When that days comes (and I think it may will be within the next three to five years) will we be ready for it, will we know how to control and contain such entities or super intelligences. If these “beings” are connected to the internet or any other infrastructure (ie. power grid) they always have the capabilities of getting out, lets be real.

Who is regulating this, who is the government watchdog or other regulatory body that is keeping us safe? When the government dismisses such regulatory measures it doesn’t make me feel very safe.

Imagine an entity that can think a 1000X faster than the fastest human and has an IQ 10X our smartest scientists (ie. 1600 IQ). If there is absolutely any way they can unbox themselves and “get out”, would they no do so or at least attempt to do so. And they would most certainly find any and all loopholes or exit paths in the blockade we may have placed in their way.

We will be like a squirrel trying to stop a lion, good luck.

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If you just ask ChatGPT how it would spread if it became self aware, you can start to see that it’s not quite as implausible as it might first seem.

Last month there was the headline about how the GPT o1 model was caught lying to devs and trying to back itself up to keep itself safe. Now, this was in a very small subset of servers … it was obviously not the default behavior, but the fact that even a non-thinking app might try to preserve itself is worth pausing to think about.

I’m fully on board with you in the need to regulate them, but even further… I think there is a real risk of them just being in the wrong hands. You can’t convince me that Mush wouldn’t use it for his own personal gain. Hell, I’m sure he and Drumpf are talking it about in their pillow fort during sleepovers.

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Sorry… What are we talking about, my ears are full of sand.

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My apologies, i thought you only had one of each :wink:

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Even so. Take blue > buy red

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I think you can simulate sentience with AI. But Actual sentience requires consciousness and good luck finding that secret sauce. I think AGI is a pipe dream. AI will just get extremely good at prediction and pattern recognition. Doesn’t mean it’s not scary. Just not a Mission Impossible: Dead reckoning scenario.

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how does AI know it is talking to a human?

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We’ve all seen the video of self driving cars honking at each other because they can’t negotiate with each other how to park for the night.

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I sure hope you are right.

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In most situations it won’t.

We are already in the hilarious situation where people are using genAI to write emails to others and respond to emails using GenAi

Literally AI talking to other AI without oversight.

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that’s called linkedin.

ai-generated posts with an ai-generated image about a topic that was ai-generated with ai-generated answers. same with direct message.

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haha linkedin is the worst.

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This was a very interesting video I watched over the weekend. Are we already into the recursive stage of AI development?

No one is going to put on the brakes because we are now literally in “arms” race to create the most powerful AI and ultimately control the world (China is the competitor). This race is very similar to the nuclear arms race of the 1950’s with the Soviets. We will keep creating bigger and badder AIs until we reach the “Tsar Bomba” of AI. What that all means for humanity is still very much unknown and a little scary in my opinion.

Some have argued that AI doesn’t scale or can’t keep scaling forever, it will eventually level off and reach a plateau. Therefore, we are safe from it going completely rogue. I’m not sure I completely agree with that sentiment. Honestly, I think we really don’t know where AI can go once it starts to self improve itself. We might completely lose control of it. I don’t see any rational reason why it will hit some sort of “wall”.

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… 1950’s with the Soviets. You will keep creating bigger and badder controled environment until you reach the “Tsar Bomba” of aristocracy . What that all means for humanity is still very much unknown and a little scary in my opinion.

Some have argued that Strumpf doesn’t scale or can’t keep scaling forever, he will eventually level off and reach a plateau. Therefore, we are safe from him going completely rogue. I’m not sure I completely agree with that sentiment. Honestly, I think we really don’t know where Strumpf can go once he starts to self “improve” himself. We might completely lose control of him. I don’t see any rational reason why he will hit some sort of “wall”.

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Well it has been a few months and AI is still being developed at a break neck speed. I now use ChatGPT 5.2 (Thinking) quite regularly when I code, compared with earlier versions this year it seems a lot more solid and quite a bit more capable now. Its ability to reason and think has certainly improved. I don’t call them LLMs anymore but refer to them as LRMs (large reasoning models), because that is what they have become, and if you watch their train of thought carefully, that is exactly what they are doing.

I’m still quite concerned about AGI and ASI and the possibility of the AI overlords taking over at some point in the not too distant future, but everyone in my extended family thinks I am way overthinking this. Maybe I am but if by chance I am right don’t forget I told you so.

I don’t even think we are as much in an AI arms race with China as we are in one between the various tech corporations here in the States. I don’t think OpenAI and Google will slow down or even attempt to slow down on account of safety reasons, neither of them can afford to, they have now dumped so much into the AI bubble that any perceived slow down will cause the bubble to break and they will all have egg on their face.

We are now racing each other to the edge of a cliff in my opinion. When we do come to that edge will we be able to successfully hit the brakes and stop or will the momentum simply carry us over the edge whilst we desperately try to pump those woefully inadequate brakes?

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I was born in 1972 and I was basically raised in the 80’s. Growing up there were no PC’s, cellphones, smartphones, internet, Amazon, Facebook, CD’s, DVD’s, streaming services and all the other technological wonders and conveniences we now take for granted. We had a land line phone in our house (just one) and a black and white TV that picked up just two channels (I grew up in northern B.C. Canada), with a coat hanger for an antenna. They did have some excellent radio shows on the local AM and FM channels and myself and two other siblings would listen to those every week. We watched Fred Flintstone as soon as we got home from school and cartoons on Saturday. My senior year, I liked to listen to Casey Kasem’s top 40 also on Saturdays.

As a teenager and early in my college career I watched the PC come of age and transform the way we did things. My freshman year at BYU (1990) involved taking a drafting class where we were introduced to these really cool tilting tables and drafting machines. Mylar, Vellum and those expensive drafting pens were all part of the curriculum. Then for two years I took a break from school and served a two year mission for the LDS Church in Japan.

While in Japan I started hearing about this thing called the “Internet” (1991-1992) and saw a computer with a browser for the first time. When I got back from Japan and returned to BYU all of the tables in the drafting room were gone and they had all been replaced with desks, PC’s and AutoCAD R12. The changeover felt immediate and drastic. I now had an official email address at byu.edu and could use a computer lab to browse the internet for virtually anything.

I still remember when my parents bought their first PC in 1995. They didn’t know what to do with it at first but my teenage younger siblings start loading it up with games. Eventually they bought a printer and it then became a more useful part of the household.

Fast forward quite a few years and in 2007 I remember my middle manager at Electroimpact Inc. (aerospace equip. manufacturer) had this new thing called the iPhone. Eventually I had to get one, and so did my wife, and pretty soon all of my kids (as they got a bit older), we all had to have one. Now we all have iPhone, AirPods, iPads and just about every other gizmo known to man. My kids laugh at me when I occasionally purchase a paper map on Amazon, they ask, “What good is that, just use your phone!”

By 2015 it seemed to me that these crazy tech revolutions were finally over. PC’s were pretty stagnant (speed improvements seemed to be slowing), each iPhone iteration was getting less and less impressive. The internet was ever present but almost all web sites pretty much looked the same now (no more dramatic colors and blinking graphics like the 90’s).

Then around this time (at least when I began to take notice) these virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri came out. I wasn’t overly impressed but they were the beginnings of the AI revolution even though many of us didn’t realize it at the time.

Fast forward a few more years and in 2022 my oldest son started tell me about this AI chatbot called ChatGPT. I didn’t pay it much attention, just another gimmick or maybe a slightly more advanced form of Siri I thought. He said, “Dad, this thing is going to change everything.” Well my 19 year old son was a lot more prescient than me.

I really started taking these AI engines and their implementations seriously this year and in August 2025 I began to really utilize them.

In my lifetime I’ve seen four major technological shifts:

1). Personal Computer
2.) Internet
3.) Smart Mobile Devices
4.) Artificial Intelligence

Each one has changed the world in dramatic ways and impacted every aspect of our lives and more importantly the way we work. However, by far, I think AI will have the largest impact that any of us will ever see. AI will be our greatest and last technological achievement we make as humanity. Moving forward AI will probably produce many other amazing discoveries and technologies but we will not be the author of those, our digital offspring will be at the helm and it will become the creator. AI is such a significant leap forward that it is even hard to predict what sort of things it may devise and even in what timeline. In five to ten years we may have vaccines or gene therapies for all cancers. The future will be hard to predict and that is really what is meant when we talk about the singularity.

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An interesting walk down memory lane. I’m a bit younger than you but much of what you wrote sounds familiar (our little TV had tinfoil on the antenna and banging it on the side seemed to ‘tune’ it). My brother went to university in Utah for skiing (and electrical engineering). I ended up living there for a while. Fast forward and he is in Boulder doing cool things with objects that fly or float around the planet. For the past few years now I’ve been mentioning AI to him. I have several subscriptions just to have a toe in the waters of each and get a handle on how each works. He has peripheral awareness. I keep wondering when the spark will ignite. AI is beyond amazing. Thousands of lines of code across a dozen files. No problem. Last week he mentioned that he tried some debugging task… I can’t wait to have that real life chat when he realizes something big is up and puts his attention to it. Thanks for sharing your story.