{"id":3532,"date":"2025-11-24T17:21:02","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T17:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=3532"},"modified":"2025-11-24T19:54:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T19:54:06","slug":"3532","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=3532","title":{"rendered":"Conclusions From AI’s ‘War on Truth’"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/h3>\n

In 1945 Robert Oppenheimer\u2019s \u2018Trinity\u2019 Nuclear Test in the desert east of Los Angeles spread radioactive pollution worldwide.\u00a0 As a consequence any metals produced since that date are too contaminated to be used in some sensitive scientific instruments.\u00a0 On 30 November 2022, OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman likes to quote Oppenheimer, released ChatGPT whose explosive growth has now polluted the internet with AI generated \u2018synth\u2019, leading at least one AI researcher to fear \u2018the extinction\u2019 of genuine human content online. It may also be an Achilles Heel of AI development, as AI models cannibalistically trained on \u2018synth\u2019 can undergo collapse. Photo – Wikipedia.<\/em><\/p>\n

This coming Sunday, 30 November, is the third anniversary of the day OpenAI let ChatGPT “into the wild” and it started to flood the online world in ‘Synth Pollution’ (aka AI Slop or info-pollution). As one commentator put it, \u2018t<\/span>he launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests\u2019. \u00a0<\/span>In May 2023 computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton\u00a0left Google \u00a0order to speak out about the dangers of AI and warned<\/a>:<\/h3>\n

\u2018the internet will be flooded with false\u00a0<\/em>photos<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>videos<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>text<\/em><\/a>, and the average person will \u201cnot be able to know what is true anymore\u201d\u2019<\/em><\/h3>\n

Now 100% human-made content makes up the minority, maybe just a quarter of content online, and at least one AI researcher fears human content (which is needed to train models) may soon become effectively extinct. \u00a0Meanwhile the fabrications created by generative AI like ChatGPT have invaded domains from journalism to education, medicine, finance, the law, science others in which being able to distinguish what’s real and what’s not, is vital to our Enlightenment-based civilisation. \u00a0If that sounds a bit highbrow, there’s the impact of affirmation of suicidal thoughts by LLM-based AI chatbots talking to teenagers.<\/h3>\n

It’s important for Civil Society as campaigns are essentially about contested versions of reality, and if the capacity to establish that with testable evidence is lost, the trust enjoyed by NGOs and the like will start to go with it, not to mention democracy.<\/h3>\n

So ChatGPT’s third birthday is not a moment for celebration but it’s time to think about what the chatbot tsunami means and what should be done about it. \u00a0I have spent six months trying to understand it and painfully slowly put together a paper on the political and social issues around AI (specifically LLM-based AI chatbots), which I will publish shortly. \u00a0I hope a few people will read it and ind it useful. It’s called AI’s War on Truth<\/em> and \u00a0has an introduction including the bizarre encounter of Sam Coates of Sky News<\/em> with ChatGPT, a section on Synth Pollution, one on the dangerous behaviours of LLM models and why they cannot be trusted, another on ten potential focal areas for Civil Society interventions which might help bring about regulation, and some conclusions.<\/p>\n

Because the conclusions are lighter reading, and some are my own non-AI generated speculations so almost weightless, I’m sharing the concluding bit of the Conclusions with you here to start with.<\/p>\n

\n

Politicians Spellbound by AI<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not many politicians will understand AI in the way they understand voters, how to rewire an electric plug at home, the behaviour of their pet dog, the press, or even economics.\u00a0\u00a0 In Empire of AI<\/em>,<\/a> Karen Hao describes how back in 2016, Chuck Schumer, then Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration, told Sam Altman\u2019s team at OpenAI:\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019re doing important work.\u00a0 We don\u2019t fully understand it, but it\u2019s important\u201d.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

At least for now, politicians are still gatekeepers for the AI industry and AI-ification of society but gatekeepers of something they probably still don\u2019t really understand.<\/p>\n

So of course politicians rely on \u2018experts\u2019 to advise them. As Hao points out (p 15<\/a>), the finance required to scale AI sucks in talent from universities so there are fewer and fewer experts available for independent research and objective testing of the claims of AI companies.\u00a0 At the moment, the UK and the US have opted to go all-in on AI.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

President Trump on \u2018winning the AI race\u2019, July 23 2025 (New York Times)<\/em><\/p>\n

For Donald Trump winning the AI race is now an extension of \u2018Make America Great Again\u2019.<\/p>\n

The UK has positioned itself on US coat-tails, with guidelines rather than regulation, and trumpets the economic benefits to be expected. In January 2025 UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer described AI as \u201cthe defining opportunity of our generation\u201d.\u00a0 The BBC\u2019s economics editor Faisal Islam commented<\/a>: \u2018The government has chosen to “go for it” on AI, not just as a long-term strategy but as a short-term message to those in the markets doubting UK growth prospects\u2019.<\/p>\n

The UK\u2019s rationale for its wholesale embrace of AI echoes Sam Altman\u2019s argument<\/a> that companies like OpenAI should have free reign and political backing to race to AGI using LLMs: only we can be trusted to do something so potentially dangerous<\/a>. In January 2025 Cabinet Minister Pat McFadden, \u201cStarmers\u2019 fixer\u201d, told the BBC<\/a>,\u00a0 \u201cyou can’t just opt out of this. Or if you do, you’re just going to see it developed elsewhere\u201d.<\/p>\n

Politicians seem dazzled by AI and not to understand that LLM-based AI chatbots are one of its riskiest and most unreliable, and probably least useful manifestations. UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle told<\/a> PoliticsHome<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cChatGPT is fantastically good, and where there are things that you really struggle to understand in depth, ChatGPT can be a very good tutor\u201d. <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

New Scientist<\/em> magazine reported<\/a> that Kyle had used Chat GPT for policy advice.<\/p>\n

In July the UK government signed a dea<\/a>l<\/a> with OpenAI to use its AI in public services. Digital rights group Foxglove called the agreement “hopelessly vague”. Foxglove\u2019s Martha Dark said the governments\u2019 “treasure trove of public data would be of enormous commercial value to OpenAI in helping to train the next incarnation of ChatGPT”, and “Peter Kyle seems bizarrely determined to put the big tech fox in charge of the henhouse when it comes to UK sovereignty”.<\/p>\n

The Politics of Magical Thinking<\/strong><\/p>\n

Go back far enough and many technologies (eg nuclear power \u201ctoo cheap to meter\u201d, and plastic) were regarded by politicians as bringing almost magical benefits.\u00a0 More recently \u2018derivatives\u2019 were taken as a sign of financial wizardry in the markets, and traders were the \u201cmasters of the universe<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

There are striking similarities with the issues of risk, understanding and political attitudes in the run up to the 2008 crash, and the massive surge of investment in AI today.<\/p>\n

The 2008 crash, led to the worst recession in 60 years, and was enabled by financial deregulation and a lack of understanding of complex financial instruments such as credit default swaps and derivatives, among economists, regulators and politicians, and even traders themselves.\u00a0 The 2008 \u2018crash Wikipedia page<\/a> includes:<\/p>\n

\u2018As financial assets became more complex and harder to value, investors were reassured by the fact that the international bond rating agencies and bank regulators accepted as valid some complex mathematical models that showed the risks were much smaller than they actually were. George Soros commented that “The super-boom got out of hand when the new products became so complicated that the authorities could no longer calculate the risks and started relying on the risk management methods of the banks themselves. Similarly, the rating agencies relied on the information provided by the originators of synthetic products. It was a shocking abdication of responsibility\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

Politicians went along with whatever \u2018the markets\u2019 threw up because they assumed it \u2018made sense\u2019 and believed the banks. \u00a0\u00a0So if they now grant AI a Golden Ticket \u2013 bring us your datacentres, take our data, educate our children \u2013 without really understanding it, their decisions rest on something else: faith, ultimately based on what the Tech bosses say, and validated by the tantalising sight of huge investment.<\/p>\n

The idea of super-benefits arising from pursuit of artificial super-intelligence necessarily rests mainly on imagination as humans have never before developed a technology which thinks for itself.\u00a0 Some of it is literally influenced by Science Fiction, together with a convenient eliding of what \u2018could be\u2019 (AI potential), with what \u2018is\u2019 (AI performance).<\/p>\n

Believing derivatives were market wizardry fitted into a more general article of market-faith and meta-narrative<\/a>, which in the UK at least, took the form of a political bundle of globalisation, privatisation and financial deregulation in the 1980s-2000s.<\/p>\n

David Dimbleby\u2019s BBC podcast history of that period Invisible Hands<\/em> ends with what happened<\/a> when Margaret Thatcher put her vision of a \u2018nation of shareholders\u2019 into practice and privatised the water industry in England and Wales (no other country did so). \u00a0The result is with us today, in the shape of a massive river pollution crisis due to under-investment and water companies indebted to the point of bankruptcy. Dimbleby says:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Margaret Thatcher privatised water in 1989 she promised it would create an efficient, modern infrastructure, there would be clean safe waterways.\u00a0 She promised everyone would have a stake in how their services were run, we\u2019d be a nation of shareholders, and yet the people who came to own our most basic services aren\u2019t individuals or even traditional utility companies.\u00a0 They are the banks, pension funds and private equity firms. They\u2019ve been bought up by these giant conglomerates and we the people, we effectively have no choice.\u00a0 It\u2019s virtually the opposite of what Margaret Thatcher wanted. We have no control\u201d. <\/em><\/p>\n

A problem with such convictions, for instance that the private sector always runs things better than any public sector operation, is that once adopted across political divides, they are very hard to reverse.\u00a0 Confirmation bias means \u2018key\u2019 bits of evidence can even get retained even if they are shown to wrong.<\/p>\n

A famous example is the spreadsheet Reinhart – Rogoff Error<\/a>.\u00a0 In 2010, respected Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a paper which seemed to show that \u2018average real economic growth slows (a 0.1% decline) when a country\u2019s debt rises to more than 90% of gross domestic product (GDP)\u2019. \u00a0The 90% figure \u2018was<\/a>employed repeatedly in political arguments over high-profile austerity measures\u2019.<\/p>\n

It seemed to prove what many politicians believed. Then a doctoral student and two Professors at the University of Massachusetts obtained the original excel sheet and discovered that Reinhart and Rogoff had accidentally only included 15 of the 20 countries under analysis in their\u00a0 key calculation<\/a>. \u00a0When this was corrected the \u201c0.1% decline\u201d data became a 2.2% average increase in economic growth \u2013 with the opposite implication for policy.\u00a0 Economists were horrified but free-market politicians set on austerity to reduce debt went on using the original interpretation.<\/p>\n

I mention these examples only because they show the importance of beliefs in politics, and how embedded and consequential they can be.\u00a0 I can\u2019t \u2018prove\u2019 this but it seems to me that a key ingredient in AI\u2019s appeal to politicians (and perhaps investors) is the techno-mythology of Silicon Valley itself.<\/p>\n

(How can this be undone? Perhaps best by treating LLM-based AI chatbots not as magical but ordinary products and demanding they meet the same sorts of standards as others).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

image – Wikipedia. \u00a0Silicon Valley lies south of the Golden Gate Bridge, Endor, John Muir Woods to the north. \u00a0For a bit one Large Language Model thought it was the Golden Gate Bridge.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Geography of Tech Magic <\/strong><\/p>\n

Context is a hugely important factor in communication. \u00a0The fact that AI is so strongly associated with \u2018Silicon Valley\u2019 as a place, a brand and a culture, has helped the industry hold politicians spellbound.\u00a0 This has helped the Tech Bro\u2019s avoid unwanted external influences such as regulation.<\/p>\n

Humans have always been beguiled by magical realms with a dual reality in geography and the mind. Politicians are not immune to imagination. Inspired by sacred Tibetan mountains, novelist James Hilton imagined the enchanted valley of \u2018Shangri-La\u2019. US President Franklin D Roosevelt adopted the name for his real-life forest retreat (it\u2019s now \u2018Camp David\u2019).<\/p>\n

When magical possibilities are a feature of real places, it makes magic all the more believable. The Greek Gods had Mount Olympus; Mount Sinai, according to the Quran, Bible and Torah, is where Moses received Ten Commandments from God; and Julius Caesar believed there were Unicorns in Germany\u2019s impenetrable Hercynian Forest.<\/p>\n

If you were looking for such fantastic beasts and wanted to know where to find them today, their legendary breeding ground is Silicon Valley. In the words of Stanford Business School, a financial Unicorn is:<\/p>\n

\u2018A privately held, venture-backed startup with a reported valuation of over one billion dollars. Coined in 2013, the term reflects how rare these companies once were. Since then, the cohort of unicorns has grown to over 1,200\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

Over half the US herd of business Unicorn is to be found<\/a> in Silicon Valley \u2013 the San Francisco Bay Area. The money raised for Unicorns has exerted a mesmerising effect on politicians worldwide.\u00a0 Erik Stam and Jan Jacob Vogelaar of Utrecht University wrote<\/a> in 2024:<\/p>\n

\u2018The mystique around unicorns and their potential to disrupt industries and shape the future economy, has resulted in a growing body of research on unicorns and many countries adopting policy objectives to increase their number of unicorns\u2019. <\/em><\/p>\n

Even the famously sober European Union has set itself<\/a> a target of doubling its number of Unicorns by 2030. \u00a0Silicon Valley casts an aura of financial magic, led by wizards with cult followings. \u00a0OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman is known for his persuasive powers as a fundraiser.\u00a0 Elon Musk\u2019s involvement is recognized as the not-so-secret sauce of Tesla\u2019s stock market valuations.<\/p>\n

Extending south from San Francisco, Silicon Valley has been the founding location or headquarters of Apple, Google, Facebook (Meta), Tesla and Twitter (X), together with thousands of other tech companies including, Oracle, Cisco, PayPal, Adobe, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Yahoo.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the second quarter of 2025, 86% of the investment<\/a> attracted to Silicon Valley Unicorns went to AI. <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0From Silicon Valley Investclub<\/em><\/p>\n

The Unicorn Uber, head-quartered in San Francisco, sold $69billion of shares on the first day of its market flotation.\u00a0 While an expanding start-up, it:<\/p>\n

\u2018generally commenced<\/a> operations in a city without regard for local regulations. If faced with regulatory opposition, Uber called for public support for its service and mounted a political campaign, supported by lobbying, to change regulations\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

Just as Social Media companies evaded classification as publishers, Uber argued:<\/p>\n

\u2018that it is “a technology company” and not a taxi company, and therefore it was not subject to regulations affecting taxi companies. Uber’s strategy was generally to “seek forgiveness rather than permission\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

A hallmark of the Silicon Valley business brand is to defy both conventional politics and financial gravity, while exuding a future oriented \u2018anything is possible\u2019.\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cGo Anywhere\u201d says Uber.\u00a0 \u201cAsk anything\u201d says ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

Silicon Valley\u2019s Dreamland Neighbours<\/strong><\/p>\n

Long before the term \u2018Silicon Valley\u2019 was coined in 1971<\/a>, its pioneers were living and working alongside the dreams business of Hollywood. \u00a0Billions of people around the world, politicians included, most of whom will never even visit California let alone Silicon Valley, have absorbed an export version of the West Coast brand through stories and movies and TV programmes, products and services backlit by sunny techno-optimism.\u00a0 But for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, movie companies and locations are part of daily reality.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Wikipedia – a shrine – Birthplace of Silicon Valley<\/em><\/p>\n

The Hewlett Packard (HP) Garage, is now a California Historical Landmark and considered to be the \u2018Birthplace of Silicon Valley\u2019.\u00a0 HP was founded in 1939, by Stanford University students Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard, encouraged by Frederick Terman, Stanford\u2019s Dean of Engineering, to stay in the area and start up their own company.\u00a0 One of HP\u2019s first clients was Walt Disney.<\/p>\n

In the 1953 Disney adaptation of J M Barries\u2019 Peter Pan<\/em>, in which Tinkerbell the fairy says<\/a> \u201call the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust\u201d and, (a line Barrie did not write but pre-echoing Tech Bro narratives), \u201cyou can\u2019t change your past, but you can let go and start your future\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0The notion of never growing old is something some Tech Bro\u2019s have taken to heart.<\/p>\n

At 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, the HP Garage is at the centre of a landscape of sacred shrines to tech start up culture, places of pilgrimage for tech enthusiasts. Not far away is \u2018the plain old suburban garage\u2019 of Apple\u2019s Steve Jobs at 2066 Crist Drive at Los Altos in Silicon Valley. It\u2019s also a listed monument<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Economists and politicians talk about the importance of establishing geographic \u2018clusters\u2019 to \u2018cross-fertilise\u2019 enterprise and build a \u2018critical mass\u2019 of related resources and businesses.\u00a0 True enough, the cities of coastal California constitute a Super Cluster of inter-twined research, technology, imagination and fantasy, so far unmatched anywhere else in the world.<\/p>\n

The cradle of Britain\u2019s old industrial revolution involved a lot of coal dust. It yielded foundational industrial political truisms such as \u201cwhere there\u2019s muck, there\u2019s brass\u201d, which to this day influences the distaste of the UK\u2019s political Old Left to environmentalism. \u00a0The cradle of California\u2019s tech-revolution is, in contrast, lined with fairy dust.<\/p>\n

Around Hollywood, NASA and research institutions such as Caltech are neighbours.\u00a0 The proximity of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Edwards Airforce Base home to the Space Shuttle, Caltech and the Star Trek studios, contributed to the original tv series anticipating an array of tech innovations<\/a> which actually came true. \u00a0A case, as Enterprise<\/em> captain Jean-Luc Picard said, of \u201cmake it so\u201d, willing something to be.<\/p>\n

The first Space Shuttle had its name changed<\/a> from Constitution<\/em> to Enterprise <\/em>in honour of the Starship Enterprise<\/em> after campaigning \u2018Trekkies\u2019 petitioned US President Gerald Ford. \u00a0Inspiration flowed both ways. Jeff Bezos realised a lifetime dream when he had a cameo part in Star Trek Beyond<\/em>.\u00a0 Life imitated art as US astronauts donned Star trek uniforms. When Mr Spock\u2019s human Leonard Nimoy passed away, ESA crew member Samantha Cristaforetti<\/em> gave a Vulcan salute from the Space Station in homage.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018ISS Expedition 43 crewmember Cristaforetti giving the Vulcan salute in 2015 to honor the late actor Nimoy\u2019 \u2013 photo NASA\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s pre-occupation with AI and bio-tech (also a major part of the Valley ecosystem), builds on<\/a> earlier Silicon Valley innovations in silicon chip production, computers (1980s) the internet, cloud computing, social media, smartphones, the Internet of Things.<\/p>\n

A succession of \u2018technological miracles\u2019 and the prospect of one \u2013 super intelligent AGI \u2013 which might rule them all, left most politicians convinced that they did not understand it, were unsure whether they should or could try to control it, and above all certain that if it might work economic magic, they wanted it on their side.\u00a0 Viewed from a distance, Silicon Valley seems an enchanted land in which science fiction can transform into science fact. \u00a0\u00a0For most politicians the culture of Silicon Valley is so alien that they need a guide. In Empire of AI <\/em>(p43) Karen Hao writes<\/a> that US policy-makers viewed Sam Altman as \u2018a gateway to Silicon Valley\u2019.<\/p>\n

Extropians and Science Fiction<\/strong><\/p>\n

In movie making, California is for science fiction, what Berlin is for spies. Ridley Scott\u2019s 1982 Blade Runner<\/em><\/a> was set in a future (2019) dystopian Los Angeles, in which AI replicants are sent to work in space colonies.\u00a0 It was made in LA, including the iconic downtown Bradbury Building<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Anyone growing up in coastal California is never far from movie locations, including in sci-fi. \u00a0Job\u2019s garage is much like the one (in real life, in Arleta, Los Angeles) in Steven Spielberg\u2019s Back to the Future,<\/em> while for Close Encounters of a Third Kind<\/em> when Spielberg had a UFO burst through a disused toll booth it was a real one at the Los Angeles St Vincent\u2019s Bridge.\u00a0 \u00a0Terminator<\/a> <\/em>features a cybernetic assassin sent back to Los Angeles from 2029, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger<\/a>, now well known as a Californian politician.<\/p>\n

Contemporary\u00a0“weird fiction<\/a>” writer and political thinker China Mi\u00e9ville believes<\/a> \u2018that Silicon Valley has misunderstood the role of science fiction, treating it more like a step-by-step guide to the future than a genre rooted in critical imagination\u2019.\u00a0 Most obviously, Elon Musk\u2019s decision to abandon tackling climate change and take up a mission to Mars.\u00a0 Musk also named his AI model Grok after a supercomputer in Douglas Adams\u2019 The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Tech Bro\u2019s often draw on science fiction for their political philosophy. Mi\u00e9ville pointed out that the tech scene \u2018has always combined elements of libertarianism, counterculture idealism, and utopian visions\u2019. \u00a0In 2025 Ali R?za Ta?kale\u00a0 wrote in Untold<\/em><\/a> :<\/p>\n

\u2018When Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook\u2019s rebranding to \u201cMeta\u201d in 2021, he wasn\u2019t just changing a logo \u2013 he was invoking Neal Stephenson\u2019s 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, in which corporations replace governments in a virtual dystopia. This was more than marketing; it was a telling example of how Silicon Valley\u2019s elite are using science fiction as a blueprint to reshape society according to their own ideologies\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

Peter Thiel, billionaire cofounder of Paypal with Musk, is also inspired by Snow Crash<\/em>, and is credited by Karen Hao<\/a>for inspiring Sam Altman\u2019s push for dominance in the race to AGI:<\/p>\n

\u2018Altman frequently channelled Thiel\u2019s \u201cmonopoly\u201d strategy, the belief that all founders should aim for monopoly\u201d to create a successful business\u2019. (p 39)\u00a0\u00a0 In a 2014 lecture called \u201ccompetition is for losers\u201d organised by Altman, Peter Thiel said \u201cmonopolies are good …\u00a0 you don\u2019t want to be superseded by somebody else … Companies needed not only to have \u201ca huge breakthrough\u201d at the beginning to establish their dominance but also to ensure they had the \u201clast breakthrough\u2019 to maintain it such as be \u201cimproving on it at a quick enough pace that no one can ever catch up\u201d. …\u00a0 If you have structure of the future where there\u2019s a lot of innovation … that\u2019s great for society.\u00a0 It\u2019s not actually that good for your business\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

So far, that\u2019s worked with ChatGPT, which got ahead and dominates the chatbot AI market.<\/p>\n

In November 2023, Gabriel Gatehouse detailed this aspect of Tech Bro world in \u2018The myths that made Elon Musk\u2019, in the Financial Times<\/em><\/a>, including their links to the Extropians. \u00a0Starting in 1988 the Extropians were looking to a point where machines would become more intelligent than humans, researching how to develop cryptocurrencies, and \u2018believed that progress was best achieved through the mechanism of pure market forces unencumbered by government\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 Gatehouse explores the Extropians in a BBC series on US conspiracy theories The Coming Storm<\/em><\/a> and a book<\/a> of the same name. \u00a0The inaugural issue of the Extropians magazine, Extropy<\/em>, is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Extropians were also associated with early ideas about extension of human life through merging with machines \u2013 transhumanism.\u00a0 In her recent book The Immortalists: \u00a0The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life<\/a><\/em> (which I haven\u2019t read), Alex Krotoski cites Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel as \u2018immortalists\u2019 intent on extending human life, or at least their own. According to a review by Graham Lawton<\/a> in New Scientist<\/em>, she sees them as having \u201cengineer\u2019s syndrome\u201d: \u2018a hubristic belief that any complex problem can be cracked using engineering thinking, even in fields (usually biological) about which they know nothing\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Elon Musk foresees an Extropian style expedition to Mars. Something like that anyway.<\/em><\/p>\n

Engineer\u2019s syndrome is similar to \u2018technological fix\u2019 or (techno-)solutionism.\u00a0 Wikipedia states:<\/p>\n

\u2018Critic Evgeny Morozov defines this as “Recasting all complex social situations either as neat problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized \u2013 if only the right algorithms are in place.” Morozov has defined this perspective as an ideology that is especially prevalent in Silicon Valley, and defined it as “solutionism”\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

According to Lawton, Krotoski also says that the tech bro\u2019s are: \u2018behind moves to cut funding for research designed to help today\u2019s older people in order to advance their own techno-utopian vision\u2019 and:<\/p>\n

\u2018In this respect, the life extension and immortality agenda is less important than their wider goal: radically rewiring the US government in the image of Silicon Valley\u2019. <\/em><\/p>\n

If this dark underside of the AI Tech Bro brand has yet to undermine the appeal of AI to investors, it may have something to do with one other dimension to the West Coast brand, slightly reflected in Musk\u2019s pioneering work on electric cars with Tesla but otherwise purely contextual: nature.<\/p>\n

The Redwood Factor<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Wikipedia<\/em><\/p>\n

If you use Google-mail and some analytics you may have noticed that by some quirk of tech, sometimes even if you live across the Atlantic, it seems to think you are in California, even Palo Alto<\/a>. The town of Palo Alto is part of Silicon Valley and location of Stanford Research Park<\/a>, which hosts Hewlett Packard and Tesla Motors. Formerly based there were Google, Facebook and Paypal. But the name refers to a tree \u2013 a Coastal Redwood, the iconic forest tree of western California. (The tree is now gone).<\/p>\n

With Redwoods comes connotations of hippy-era alternative ideas and modern environmental awareness.\u00a0 John Muir, a C19th immigrant to the US from Scotland, is arguably the best candidate to be founder of the modern environmental movement, and is memorialised in the name of Muir Woods<\/a>, a protected fragment of Coastal Redwood old-growth forest just north of San Francisco.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Endor in Star Wars, which looks like John Muir Woods (photo starwars.com)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

John Muir (right) with President Theodore Roosevelt at Yosemite. Muir played a key role in saving the Giant Redwood forests.\u00a0 (From goodfreephotos.com)<\/em><\/p>\n

Not far from there is Skywalker Ranch owned by George Lucas, film maker and founder of \u2018Industrial Light and Magic\u2019.\u00a0 Lucas wanted Muir Woods to feature as Endor tree and fern-filled world in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi<\/em> \u00a0but filming was not allowed<\/a> due to its sensitive ecology.\u00a0 Instead scenes were instead shot in Redwood forest on remote private land owned by a logging company in northwest California.\u00a0 Here, the movie makers could do what they liked, as it was to be clear- felled shortly afterwards but keeping things positive, that\u2019s not often mentioned<\/p>\n

Instead the Redwood Factor context imbues tech R&D with an aura of positivity, possibility and benign<\/em> techno optimism.\u00a0 It\u2019s a background effect but it softens and greens the Silicon Valley brand, and the remnant Redwood Forests at Mariposa Grove and Yosemite Valley east of San Francisco have featured in movies including the Star Trek V: The Final Frontier<\/a>.<\/em> \u00a0Possibly it also made it easier to see young Tech Bro\u2019s as Peter Pan rather than Captain Hook.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>.<\/p>\n

William Shatner clings to a fake cliff above Yosemite Valley as Captain James T Kirk (image sfgate.com) before the special effects were added<\/em><\/p>\n

None of the Tech Bro\u2019s have shown any interest in nature so far as I know but many people in California do, so perhaps one day it might be used to some good effect on Big Tech.<\/p>\n

Framing Issues<\/strong><\/p>\n

The framing<\/a> of AGI as a \u2018singularity\u2019 we are approaching but which lies an unknowable point in the future, plays to speculation, which is the friend of the industry as it does not lead to a resolution and hence a political or social need to act.<\/p>\n

Striking though \u2018a precipice in the fog\u2019 is (Yoshua Bengio in Part 2), it suggests the dangers will only materialise once we reach that point.\u00a0 In the case of a precipice we would also definitely know if we reached AGI but what if the mist just gradually gets so thick that we end up irretrievably lost and separated? \u00a0Frames triggered by functional metaphors exert a powerful effect on our thinking and politics, and debate itself can get waylaid by a fog of metaphors.<\/p>\n

What is for sure, is that like other \u2018future\u2019 risks, anything framed in the \u2018proximate future\u2019 can act like an \u2018ever receding horizon\u2019<\/a> and fails to tick the politically \u2018urgent\u2019 box unless you can produce the equivalent of a map to show where that precipice is (more or less what climate modellers eventually managed to do).<\/p>\n

Psychologically, it\u2019s also a \u2018nothing to do with me\u2019 for citizens and consumers.\u00a0 An undefined \u201cthey\u201d are driving the vehicle or leading the group towards the precipice, or not.\u00a0 \u201cThey\u201d could be politicians, or the tech companies, possibly the investors but it\u2019s definitely, someone else.<\/p>\n

Instead of AGI or superintelligence, the path to consumers and citizens having agency in the game lies in real world harms happening now, such as but probably not only, impacts on mental health through dangerous reaffirmation, and through other info-pollution by synth content, domains where truth is vital, such as in education, the law, finance, medicine, politics and health. They should be banned in such areas of life.<\/p>\n

Debates in AI world such as whether anthropomorphism is a problem and even whether models are \u2018truly\u2019 intelligent or not, are, from a consumer and citizen point of view, pretty much distinctions-without-a-difference, and in the end can depends on what you think human consciousness actually is.\u00a0 Whenever AI can pass as human, we have a potential problem.\u00a0 It would also make more sense to first better understand human intelligence, before embarking on trying to make \u2018artificial intelligence better than human\u2019.<\/p>\n

Another problematic framing issue is describing LLM-based AI chatbots as just a \u2018tool\u2019.\u00a0 Thinking of it as a tool product, can indeed unfold into the logic of needing training, maybe licensing and regulation. Chris Rapley, Emeritus Professor of Climate Science at UCL said to me: \u201cAn LLM is a tool. Its output reflects both its intrinsic quality and its user’s skill. Giving one to the naive is like handing a faulty chainsaw to a toddler.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in other ways, in terms of risk and reliability, it is not at all \u2018like a tool\u2019 such as a calculator, as discussed in Part Two. It often deceives and misleads and, unlike a pencil or hammer, creates and offers to substitute for human thought, even experience.<\/p>\n

It strikes me that the intriguing, reassuring, sometimes entertaining, easily accessible, addictive qualities of LLM-based AI chatbots make them more like \u2018recreational\u2019 drugs \u2013 the true Tech Drugs<\/a> – than many other sorts of policy problems. Like addictive drugs they provide an easy but ultimately illusory way to alleviate painful personal problems, or enter a false reality. \u00a0Like addictive drugs and Social Media, they can create concerns for individuals, friends and family when use becomes problematic, and may leave a trail of need for costly social interventions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Frames in use in the UK in the 2000s on problems arising from illegal drugs (research on alcohol and tobacco is also relevant). Choice of metaphor defines the deficit\/need and the logic of responsibility. (In this case the UK media, politicians and public often used very different frames.) [My slide summarising UK Government research].\u00a0Communication issues around drugs policy is a much-studied field \u2013 similar research on LLM-based AI chatbots is in its infancy.<\/em><\/p>\n

One big difference between illegal drugs and AI at the moment is that we know exactly who is responsible for producing LLM-based AI chatbots but even that might not last if agents get to replicate themselves online and create new variants of AI.<\/p>\n

One way to start would be take a leaf out of the book of the (eventually) successful campaigns to restrict smoking.\u00a0 Enable people to disapprove of the use of LLM-AI chatbots for \u2018the wrong things\u2019, starting with the socially most compelling cases.\u00a0 Legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco are recognized as risk-bearing and subject to legal restrictions and mandatory warnings but culture plays a key role in how far governments will go, and how effective those regulations are.<\/p>\n

Justification<\/strong><\/p>\n

In reality we don\u2019t need AI to reach AGI or superintelligence level for it to have wreak disastrous, possibly irrecoverable (catastrophic) effects.\u00a0 The information-pollution disaster is already here and will have continuing and cumulative impacts, including on mental health. All it takes for others to occur is time.\u00a0 They could be precipitated by accident, or by malicious acts. \u00a0On 15 November 2025 Anthropic reported<\/a> that it had (mostly) thwarted the first known autonomous AI cyberattack:<\/p>\n

\u2018The threat actor\u2014whom we assess with high confidence was a Chinese state-sponsored group\u2014manipulated our Claude Code tool into attempting infiltration into roughly thirty global targets and succeeded in a small number of cases. The operation targeted large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies. We believe this is the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n

While it was initiated by humans, the attack was then run by agentic AI. The humans tricked Anthropic\u2019s Claude into breaking its own \u2018guardrails\u2019 (\u2018jailbreaking\u2019) by pretending to Claude \u2018that it was an employee of a legitimate cybersecurity firm, and was being used in defensive testing\u2019. \u00a0The incident was widely reported but passed off so far as I noticed, without any noticeable political response.<\/p>\n

ends<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1945 Robert Oppenheimer\u2019s \u2018Trinity\u2019 Nuclear Test in the desert east of Los Angeles spread radioactive pollution worldwide.\u00a0 As a consequence any metals produced since that date are too contaminated to be used in some sensitive scientific instruments.\u00a0 On 30 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3532"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3559,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3532\/revisions\/3559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}