General Artificial Intelligence: A Global Existential Threat

Fernando A. Iglesias
Co-President of the World Federalist Movement, Director of the Spinelli Chair in Buenos Aires,
Member of the Argentinian Parliament

Let’s suppose that decades ago someone had formulated these prophecies. Prophecy A: “A democratic world parliament will legislate on common issues of humanity such as environmental protection, nuclear proliferation, and technology control.” Prophecy B: “A binary network based on electrical impulses will instantly connect the world and become the axis around which social relationships revolve. We will work on it and for it; we will study through it; politics and economy will depend on it, and we will delegate increasingly important decisions to it, starting from the best way back home and ending with the choice of our love partners.” Of these two prophecies, which one would have been considered more realistic and which one more utopian and improbable thirty years ago?

Politics lags behind the facts. With this phrase begins the Manifesto for Global Democracy that I wrote ten years ago and was signed by top intellectuals from all ideologies. In the asynchronous world we live in, we have 21^st-century technology, a 20^th-century economy, and a 19^th-century politics, whose basic institutions are nation-states created to manage an industrial universe which is disappearing. While technology accelerates, the timid attempts made by human beings to elevate democracy and federalism to a global scale prove to be insufficient. With every global crisis, such as the recent pandemic, international institutions show their lack of transparency and effectiveness, and their failures feed the idea of their uselessness at the very moment when they are increasingly necessary.

Of the major existential threats facing humanity, the greatest one is called General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) and it can generate exponential impacts. Two factions have already formed around it: the apocalyptic and the integrated. Among the apocalyptic who warn about a possible wave of mass unemployment, total loss of privacy, end of democracy, and even the disappearance of humanity, the most well-known is Yuval Harari. Among the integrated who believe that when GAI will surpass the capacity of a single human being, first, and the capacity of all humanity, later, we will enter a world of abundance and expansion of our possibilities, Raymond Kurzweil stands out. In any case, technological singularity is approaching and no one knows for sure what might happen. But something is certain: as human power increases, the binary choice between heaven and hell becomes more concrete.

In our asynchronous universe, technology advances at the speed of light and politics moves at the pace of a cart. From the resulting chaos emerges a global rift. On one side, the “patriots,” nationalist sovereigntists who believe that any form of supranational power is illegitimate and think that the global civilization of the 21^st century can be managed by 19^th-century national institutions. On the other side, the “globalists”, cosmopolitans who believe that national sovereignties should be respected in national affairs but a global institutional system based on democracy and federalism is essential to provide global solutions to global crises. Among us, there was a certain Albert Einstein, who while teaching nuclear physics at Princeton organized meetings of the World Federalist Movement at his home and proposed a world government to prevent nuclear proliferation.

Since then, since Hiroshima, the control of technology has been at the core of global political problems. Institutions capable of protecting the common goods of humanity and facing global threats are necessary to prevent a catastrophe. But the “patriots” disagree. They point to the use of the 2030 Agenda by woke ideology and discredit the UN. They are not without reasons. However, the idea that it is possible to continue globalizing technology and the economy without advancing global policies or to believe that behind them are hidden George Soros, Bill Gates and a Jewish-Masonic-communist plot is to return to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and to their consequences.

For decades, when in the World Federalist Movement we wondered what could compel human beings to understand that we are a single community inhabiting a small and fragile planet and, therefore, obliged to make joint decisions, the answer was: a Martian invasion. Well, the Martian invasion is among us. It’s called General Artificial Intelligence and it entails the creation of a difficult-to-control alien entity that doesn’t share our values but has access to all our technologies, including nuclear arsenals. That’s why TIME magazine titled “The end of humanity - how real is the risk”. The magnitude of the problem has been understood in all advanced countries, but we are running behind the facts, failing to overcome the contradiction between our slowness in political reforms and our brilliance in accelerating technological innovation.

GAI poses an existential threat to humanity. The enormous contributions it can make to human well-being create apocalyptic risks. One risk is that we lose control of the technology. Another risk is that we don’t lose control. In the first case, we will depend on an entity that will view us as we view ants – such will be the difference between its intelligence and that of a human being. In the second case, the dissemination of knowledge about weapons of mass destruction will fatally place them in the hands of a new Eróstratos, the Greek shepherd who burned the Temple of Artemis. The Korean regime and the Iranian ayatollahs have excellent chances of being such actors. International terrorist groups, global corporations, and the two great powers vying for global hegemony can generate other ones.

The intrinsic anarchy of a universe based on the sovereign power of two hundred nations raises fears that it may already be too late. Technologically, it’s unclear how GAI could be controlled at this stage of its development. Politically, the world faces the same dilemmas that destroyed Europe a hundred years ago. The march of fascism on Rome was in 1922, and the failed Nazi coup against the Weimar Republic, in 1923. That’s how it all started. Within two decades, the Europe of absolute national sovereignties led to the worst destructive episodes in human history. Fortunately, nuclear weapons only emerged towards the end of the war and were in the hands of just one of the contenders. Unfortunately, we humans have decided to give tragedies a rematch.

Are we headed for paradise or hell? Will Kurzweil or Harari be right? Nobody knows, but technologies with global impact in the hands of two hundred states designed to prioritize their own objectives is a suicidal formula. The fact that GAI is arriving before any form of global regulation can control its development, while we are preoccupied with stopping a nostalgic “patriot” of the Tsarist empire who threatens nuclear holocaust, is not a coincidence, but the inevitable effect of renouncing the globalization of democratic institutions. “We have heard the rationales offered by the superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations, but who speaks for the human species?” wrote Carl Sagan in the 80’s, when ChatGPT was science-fiction. Politics has been incapable of providing an answer; then technology is slipping out of control. Now, as Ulrich Beck argued, going beyond the zombie categories through which we politically conceive the global world has become a matter of survival.