By Dr. David Sanders
We heard this week over and again about the dangers of AI; without proper caution AI will kill us. Jacob Coxon, a researcher who resigned from Anthropic, garnered over 150 million views for his whistleblowing post on Instagram. His post also catalyzed the major AI developers to make their own statements, all of which concurred with Jacob’s assessment.
Twenty-five years ago, my cousin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, published a book with the title: Creating Friendly AI, which AI described as “one of the earliest formal attempts to define and tackle the challenge of ensuring a self-improving artificial intelligence remains benevolent to humanity.” His most recent book published last year had a more ominous title, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI would Kill Us All. AI described this book as arguing that the creation of an artificial superintelligence will almost certainly cause human extinction.
In each and every current interview, from Jacob Coxon to Eliezer Yudkowsky, to the heads of Anthropic, Open AI and Gemini, they position AI as a wonder, an endless resource of intelligence that will benefit humanity and potentially be lethal.
I have drawn the parallel between the polarity seen in AI and the duality of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. The Garden of Eden myth is a prescient warning about the challenges of eating forbidden fruit and facing mortality. Eve, similar to Pandora, is warned not to go near that which is the domain of the Gods. As readers of the story, we know that Pandora will open the jar (box) and Eve will partake of the tree’s fruit. Curiosity is such a powerful human proclivity, that any warning, even one as strong as, if you eat you will surely die, would inevitably be pushed aside. We have opened and tasted AI. There is no turning back.
When I was a child, I was told that the only thing that could unite humanity and stop all wars and bloodshed was if we had a common enemy. Well, it is not an alien from another solar system, it is in our midst, a creation of our own doing. What might unite us? The myth of the Garden of Eden has another story to unfold, the other Tree. At first obscured by the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, but then revealed, the Tree of Life is the antidote to the lethality of its neighboring tree. Good and Bad are two paths we can go down. AI offers both. One leads to annihilation, the other to life. It will be our choice.
