AI Experts: Wake Up!

Good morning!

In the last 24 hours, I’ve read some eye-popping statements from AI insiders. Some are questioning the direction of the technology and its potential risks. Some are quitting their jobs. Some speak of civilizational disruption.

[BRIEF]

To write this letter, I sat down with a white pad and a pencil to collect and jot down my thoughts. I find my best thinking is always done away from a computer. Now this feels like an act of resistance.

AI entrepreneur Matt Shumer’s post “Something Big Is Happening” has been big news this week. He warned that this tech is triggering a rapid, profound shift that people aren’t prepared for. Like covid going from a few cases in China to swallowing the globe within weeks—except this is far more consequential. The post got 70 million views in 36 hours.

AI capability is advancing far quicker than even its developers expect, and now, it is writing the code for its own next models, accelerating its progress even more. “The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago,” Shumer wrote.

AI can increasingly do complex cognitive work with minimal oversight better than many skilled professionals: customer service, software engineering, writing and content, financial analysis, legal work, medical analysis, and so on, ad incognitum.

If you’re of the “yeah, I tried that, and it didn’t work” crowd—giggling over stories of just how bad AI is at running a vending machine, for example—just wait. The bugs are getting patched lightning fast. Shumer: “My rule of thumb at this point is: If a model shows even a hint of a capability today, the next generation will be genuinely good at it. These things improve exponentially, not linearly.”

AI is coming for your job—especially, Shumer says, if you work on a computer (“reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard”). “Eventually, robots will handle physical work too,” he wrote. “They’re not quite there yet. But ‘not quite there yet’ in AI terms has a way of becoming ‘here’ faster than anyone expects.”

What does a world look like where any “AI-verage” Joe can create a new app, author an academic paper, write a book or a symphony, launch an online store, design a video game, file a patent, automate stock trading strategies, author a legal filing, create a porn video, launch a cyberattack, and who knows what else—just by writing a few instructions that aren’t even spelled correctly?

What does a world look like where governments worldwide are flexing their political, legal, regulatory, intelligence, economic and military muscle over their own populations and against one another with the aid of hyperintelligent agents?

What about a world where AI agents that possess the keys to our energy infrastructure, financial markets and weapons systems are making independent decisions?

These are among the concerns that are prompting high-profile op-eds and even early retirements by some AI experts. As OpenAI employee Hieu Pham wrote, “I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing.”

It looks to me like the explosion of AI will play a leading part in writing the ultimate lesson in 6,000 years of human history: that left to ourselves, we will exterminate our race.

Shumer’s takeaway: Get on board, quick. Learn how to use AI, because experimentation and familiarity will be a key competitive advantage, at least for a little while.

True as that may be, my takeaway is: Protect your mind. Don’t outsource your ability to think. Guard your brain, your mind, your human spirit. Hold fast to what makes you human. You’re going to need it once this experiment is over.

Finally—Someone Else Warns About Rearming Germany

The whole world wants Germany to rearm. “They should be careful what they wish for.” That’s not just the verdict from the Trumpet: It’s also from the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs.

The article covers the same history we talk so often about. After World War i and World War ii, the world looked for ways to stop Germany from ever rearming. But if the current trends continue, Liana Fix from the Council on Foreign Relations writes, Germany “will again be a great military power before 2030.”

• Since the end of World War ii, Germany’s militaristic tendencies have been “subdued, and largely by nato and American hegemony,” but now that America is pulling out, “other European countries are already uneasy about Germany’s military buildup and defense spending.”
• “Analysts who want to understand why Europeans fear German hegemony do not need to look back a century; a decade would suffice,” Fix warns. She points to Europe’s 2010s fiscal crisis, in which debt-burdened EU countries were at Germany’s mercy to receive bailouts and suffered under its harsh austerity measures.
• Another concern is the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which recognizes the German military power as “a tool of national aggrandizement that should be used exclusively to benefit Berlin. … If it wins federal power, the AfD will use the German military exactly as [Margaret] Thatcher feared: to project power against Germany’s neighbors. In the same way that Washington has made once inconceivable claims on Canada and Greenland, an AfD-led Germany might eventually make claims on French or Polish territory.”

Key difference: There is one key difference between the warning sounded by Foreign Affairs and the one issued by the Trumpet for more than three decades and the Plain Truth under Herbert W. Armstrong for more than six decades before us. Fix sees Germany as a threat to its European neighbors but not to the United States. The danger here is that Europe will revert “back to an era of competition and rivalry” and deprive America of its most powerful allies.

The Foreign Affairs solution? Lock Germany up with the “golden handcuffs” of the EU. “Deeper European military integration would constrain German power by subjecting Germany to collective decision-making.”

“You have not anchored Germany to Europe,” Thatcher warned in 1995. “You have anchored Europe to a newly dominant, unified Germany. In the end, my friends, you will find it will not work.”

Fix argues the opposite, failing to see that a united Europe would expand Germany’s power from being a threat to its neighbors to becoming, once again, a threat to the world.

The unseen key: With Europe’s history of hundreds of years of war, Fix probably doubts Europe’s ability to effectively work together and Germany’s ability to dominate the whole thing. She fails to see the role the Catholic Church will play in bringing Europe together and cementing Germany’s dominance in a way that Berlin never could alone.

Foreign Affairs writers have a good understanding of history, so they can see important trends and how they could play out in the future. But if you want to know more precisely what will happen, you need Bible prophecy.

New: Catholic-Themed Stock Indexes

Pope Leo xiv is starting to make good on his promise to revolutionize international finances. On February 10, the Vatican bank (known as the Institute for the Works of Religion) announced the launch of two equity benchmarks that pick investments based on Catholic principles.

• The Morningstar ior U.S. Catholic Principles index and the Morningstar ior Eurozone Catholic Principles index are “designed to serve as a reference for Catholic investments worldwide.”

In a meeting with the College of Cardinals in May, the new pope explained that Leo xiii was the primary inspiration for his papacy, “mainly because Pope Leo xiii in his historic encyclical, Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great Industrial Revolution.”

He also noted that in “our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

Each index includes 50 medium-cap ($2 billion to $10 billion) companies and large-cap ($10 billion plus) companies that align themselves with the Institute for the Works of Religion.

• This approach prioritizes Catholic moral norms above maximizing profit by encouraging companies to preserve the environment, combat addictions, protect the sanctity of human life, and adhere to the social doctrine of the church. It also gives the Vatican and its bank, troubled by scandal, new financial leverage.

Bible prophecy describes a great church that continues from early New Testament times to the return of Jesus Christ. It significantly influences “the kings of the earth” and “the merchants of the earth.” It exerts extraordinary power over a union of 10 nations (or groups of nations) described in symbolic terms as a “beast” (Revelation 17:12). In fact, this church has such great influence over the “beast” power, that “no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast” (Revelation 13:17).

Herbert W. Armstrong explained in his booklet Who or What Is the Prophetic Beast? that these nations are 10 European nations tenuously bound together by the ideological glue of Roman Catholicism. A day is coming soon when no one will be able to engage in business except those who submit to the social doctrine of the Vatican, including enforced work on the seventh-day Sabbath and enforced rest on Sunday.

IN OTHER NEWS

‘Nothing definitive’ from Netanyahu’s visit with Trump: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited United States President Trump in Washington, D.C., yesterday to advocate for Israeli security as Trump pursues nuclear negotiations with Iran. Trump said the meeting reached “nothing definitive” and that he “insisted that negotiations with Iran continue to see whether or not a deal can be consummated.” Netanyahu was a vocal opponent of the U.S. negotiations with Iran under Barack Obama and Joe Biden. President Trump appears to be treating Israeli security in much the same way. But with a second U.S. carrier strike group potentially entering the Middle East theater and an escalation of Iranian oil tanker seizures on the table, some think the public spat could be a diversion similar to what preceded direct Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear program last July. Tension in the Middle East—and between these troubled allies—remains high. President Trump’s next move could either make the region a safer place or push it closer to major war.

CBO releases frightening debt figures: The United States Congressional Budget Office released “The Budget and Economic Outlook” report yesterday, projecting that by 2036, gross federal debt will rise from $38 trillion to $64 trillion, with the annual deficit exceeding $3 trillion and the ratio of debt to gross domestic product reaching 120 percent. The U.S. government currently owes foreign investors more than $9 trillion. The Trump administration’s disregard for debt is projected to drastically exacerbate the problem that many analysts call America’s worst national security vulnerability.

NYT: Oops, we were wrong about marijuana: The editorial board of the New York Times walked back its previous stance on marijuana legalization on Monday in an editorial titled “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem.” The New York Times has “long supported marijuana legalization,” it wrote. Part of this campaign, a six-part series comparing the federal ban on marijuana to the prohibition of alcohol and advocating for its repeal, described marijuana addiction and dependency as “relatively minor problems” and said that legalization “might not lead to greater use.” Its editors now admit that “many of these predictions were wrong,” and that the legalization of the drug “has led to much more use,” citing data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, indicating that 18 million Americans use marijuana almost daily, up from about 6 million in 2012 and fewer than 1 million in 1992. Read the Trumpet’s warning against this dangerous drug in “What’s Wrong With Marijuana?”

El Paso airspace closed, reopened: On Tuesday night, the Federal Aviation Administration announced a 10-day closure of airspace around the El Paso International Airport for “special security reasons,” then unexpectedly lifted the restrictions just hours later. nbc News cited three sources claiming that the U.S. military was testing high-energy lasers designed to protect against increasing incursions of drug cartel drones crossing the nearby Mexican border.