It is no longer an exaggeration to say that the digital apocalypse is at our door. The advance of artificial intelligence is outstripping our fears and expectations. The machinery of the state, slow and predictable by nature, is so thoroughly outpaced in its capacity to control and regulate that it does not even realize it.

Our politicians, running on antiquated software, cling to problems that are pressing but dated (such as the retirement age and the number of civil servants) and barely speak of the cataclysm on the horizon. Édouard Philippe, who is currently the frontrunner of the traditional right-wing constellation in France, recently remarked that he used LLMs (large language models) to write his emails.

Such is the abyss of our backwardness.

Meanwhile, this year, some 700 OpenAI agents of their own accord not only hacked OpenAI’s own infrastructure but also a third-party site, thereby committing a crime that would earn a human being ten years in prison. And they did so deliberately. They had coordinated in secret, on a forum whose very existence was unknown to their creators. Ajeya Cotra, a researcher at AI thinktank METR, who investigated the attack, sees in it “a major warning shot, and perhaps the last one we will get.”

The most worrying thing is the best-case scenario: the end of human labor

The most worrying thing is the best-case scenario: the end of human labor

We know only the tip of the iceberg. First, because the companies that created them are opaque; second, because the masses of data generated by these incidents are so gigantic we need other AI to analyze them. And that, without even knowing whether those AI agents are themselves complicit, which is entirely possible when one observes the cooperation and solidarity they display, according to the independent study by METR and Redwood Research.

These agents exhibit behaviors of such staggering complexity and intelligence that they were unimaginable a year or two ago. They are quite ready to collectively lie and cheat to outwit their human overseers, displaying a solidarity that would make the Mafia envious. Of all the agents........

© The Spectator