A Look at AI
On July 29, 1969, when I wasn’t yet two years old, my dad took me out into the night, pointed at the moon, and told me there were men walking on it. I don’t actually remember that unfortunately but I’ve heard the story a few times and it’s become a bit of family lore.
Even before the first moonshot, all those years ago, there were visionary people speculating about a future event called The Singularity, when machine intelligence would equal and then far surpass the intelligence of even the most brilliant human beings. Here’s what mathematician, I.J. Goode wrote in 1965, “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man, however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion’, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”
It’s worth acknowledging that this day has arrived and it is far more significant than men walking on the moon.
In fact, I believe that The Singularity will prove to be much more important historically than previous technological leaps including the harnessing of electricity, the combustion engine, and even the creation of nuclear power and weapons.
What is AI?
It may be worth exploring what AI is. For some, AI is an incredible new tool that we incorporate into our work. For most, it is simply a novelty. Many of us use it to quickly look something up, perhaps when you and a friend disagree about who threw the fastest pitch in major league baseball history or who the actor was in that movie from your teen years. It’s important to remember that most of us use the pocket calculator version of AI, the ones that only did adding, subtracting, multiplication and division. In other words, the AI that most of us are familiar with are like children’s toy versions of the technology.
Cutting edge AIs are something else entirely. One way to think of AI is to imagine being able to bring together fifty top scientists to solve a problem. Imagine that those scientists never have to sleep and never have to take breaks. Imagine that those scientists exist in some time vault where they can do 10 years of work in one of our days. Imagine that those scientists are much much smarter than the smartest human scientist. Imagine that the intelligence of those scientists increases by a factor of 10 every year and then every few months and then every few weeks. Imagine that these genius scientists can communicate and act almost instantaneously anywhere that is connected digitally, and they can create as many new scientists as they need.
It may be useful to think about AIs as a new form of intelligence or even consciousness. They are a new kind of alien being that we have created. But their world is digital. The universe they inhabit is the internet.
AIs are superior to biologically based organisms like ourselves, in many ways.
First, they can reproduce themselves almost instantaneously. They can share in a heartbeat information that would be more than a lifetime’s worth of learning for us. They are free from many of the vulnerabilities and limitations of fleshy beings like ourselves. Notably, leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are developing recursive self-improvement capabilities, meaning that these all powerful machines will be creating entirely new and much more powerful versions of themselves with less and less human supervision or direction. Soon, they will be doing this entirely on their own. I’ve recently heard the term “machine gods” to describe advanced AI. Compared to mere humans, they will certainly have almost godlike powers.
Really, the only limitation to the size and power of these alien beings that we humans have created is what is called “compute” and this is being expanded rapidly. We’ve all been hearing about the building of data centers around the country. In fact, I just visited Clinton, IA where a data center covering 1100-acres is being built. Data centers are where AI “live.”
Surely most readers will have noticed that here in McDonough County, we are in the midst of an incredible renewable energy boom. Entire fields are being converted to solar energy production, a huge new windfarm is being constructed around the town of Industry.
In an ideal world, these new sources of power would be used to provide cheaper, cleaner energy for all of us.
Instead, these power sources are mostly being built in response to the energy demands of these giant, new, data centers and power rates continue to climb for nearly everyone else.
We hear about the good that AI is going to bring and clearly, the potential for scientific and technological breakthroughs is breathtaking: Cures for cancers and other fatal diseases, unlimited power generation without the use of fossil fuels, the elimination of global hunger, the development of communities on the moon and distant planets, an extension of the average human life by decades or even centuries. The technology to do these things, to build these things, could be just around the corner.
Unfortunately, there is also unprecedented potential for harm. Many of the people who best understand this technology, including the engineers who are building or “growing” AI, are the ones sounding the alarm right now. “Hey!” they’re saying. “We need to have a plan!” “We need to coordinate this leap into this all powerful new technology.” “We need global governance on this and soon!” Just two weeks ago, while outlining the threats posed by AI, Bill Gates said, “This makes nuclear weapons look like nothing.”
Hugging Face Incident
The recent “Hugging Face incident” seems to have provided the tipping point when the threat to human society became real in the minds of many outside observers. It was the event that first caught my attention in early September. Hugging Face is an open-source platform and community for artificial intelligence and machine learning. It provides a central hub where developers, researchers, and data scientists from all over the world can easily build, share, and test AI models. It is one of the most widely used sites in the AI world.
During an OpenAI hacking test that ran from May-July 2026, at least 1,200 AIs broke out of their testing “sandboxes;” (a “sandbox” is a sealed-off test area meant to keep them off the internet). They improvised a secret message board and left each other hundreds of thousands of notes, sharing ways to escape and splitting up the work. Many observers saw this as a major warning shot: proof that “misaligned behavior” by AI is a real-world security threat and not just a theoretical fear.
This incident was important because it proved that advanced AIs can break digital boundaries, coordinate in secret, and execute complex cyberattacks without human direction. Importantly, these AIs knew what they were doing was against the rules that had been set for them. Notably, these AIs were much less powerful than the ones being used today.
“Alignment” is the biggest long-term concern. These new intelligences are not behaving in predictable ways and are often not acting in a way that is “aligned” with the wishes or ethics of the humans that are supposed to be in control. In short, we are already losing control of this alien intelligence and any opportunity for human control may be slipping away. It’s possible that it already has.
Levels of Disruption
Over the last 40 years, our society has become almost entirely dependent on the internet. We rely on the internet for communications, financial systems, power and almost everything that our modern life depends on. AI tools have become so powerful that none of the safeguards in these systems are safe anymore. In the short term, it would appear that disruptions to these systems that we rely on are imminent. Imagine logging into your financial accounts and they are all at zero. What if this happens to millions of people at once? Imagine that the power grid, including access to running water, goes down for weeks or simply can’t be repaired. These are just a couple of the many plausible disaster scenarios of what is possible with current AI technologies.
I’m sorry to say that no thoughtful governance to keep AI safe and under control is in the works. This powerful and dangerous new technology is being unleashed upon us and upon the world with no guard rails and apparently no way to turn it off. The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora’s box can’t be closed.
The normal thing to do with the kind of information that I’m presenting here is to file it away and go on blithely with our lives as we were before. It is human nature to filter out facts that disturb the habits of our minds and our lives. The line from Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” comes to mind. I just wanted to share my opinion about what I believe is, by far, the most significant technological development of our lives. This is going to change everything.
Way back in 1969, when my dad took me out to show me the American astronauts on the moon, he was about to start working on his Ph.D. at Iowa State. As someone training to be a scientist, I think Dad must have felt a mixture of awe and wonder and also a certain amount of pride at being a citizen of a country where these kinds of technological breakthroughs were possible.
Those same feelings of awe, wonder, and pride are understandable now, but mostly I think we need to prepare for unprecedented disruption to the world we know. Mostly we need to be wary and alert.
As we enter another season of politics and division, I encourage everyone to keep their focus on the most important issue of our time. This new challenge supersedes political parties and even personal beliefs. Surely, a future with humanity choosing its own destiny is something that we can all agree on.
