A grave threat is a grave issue these days.
Sara is accused of grave threats before the Senate impeachment court and before the Regional Trial Court Branch 98.
When Sara showed up at the RTC one Saturday to post P360,000 bail – P120,000 each for threatening to kill President Marcos Jr., the First Lady and the former speaker, the Vice President herself defined the meaning of grave threat – “I am not safe here,” she said, referring to Branch 98 and to her police security because she was a wanted woman. A grave threat means one feels unsafe.
If a person like VP Sara, who has a 400-strong security contingent, does not feel safe despite the absence of explicit threats (except in the realm of her wild imagination; she thought she was a Ninoy Aquino climbing up the stairs of Branch 98 about to be killed by her security escort), how much more of Marcos Jr., Liza Marcos and Martin Romualdez, who have been threatened by Sara herself at least twice with an assassination contract?
Sara is being tried at the Senate for four crimes: one, she misused or pocketed P612.5 million of taxpayers’ money and produced 5,000 fictitious names (including two named after a vagina and four named after animals and fish) to account for the missing monies; two, amassing unexplained wealth of P6.7 billion despite having earned only P24 million in salaries as a public official; three, bribing her subordinates to make them malleable in biddings and four, threatening to kill the president of the Philippines, the First Lady and the then speaker.
Sara’s reaction to her impeachment and being sued before a local court? Colossal arrogance and sense of impunity. She thinks she is the next president and behaves as if she is already the president. She ignores the impeachment court; she insults the RTC Branch 98; she insults the Philippine National Police, implying it is incompetent and unreliable; she gallivants around the world using taxpayers’ money.
Anyway, in the context of global developments, Sara Duterte and her shenanigans are just like a firecracker in the skies replete with millions of galaxies.
Sara and her dramatics are just a tiny speck in the vast galaxy of major developments.
The biggest threat to our lives and lifestyle is not Sara and her imagined enemies. It is not her impending presidency.
It is AI – artificial intelligence. AI gone rogue. AI gone berserk.
The inventors of AI are worried. The advances in improving AI have been such that one researcher claims AI is now capable of killing humans by the end of the decade. Over the next five to 10 years, AI will be a grave threat to humans. Humanity as we know it, with 8.4 billion, will become extinct. AIs will take over the world. They will be infinitely more intelligent and more vile than any human born in the last 2,000 years.
“AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious,” writes Dario Amodei, 43, co-founder of Anthropic, the developer of Claude AI. Risks include losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism and serious economic disruption. Also, AI could fall into the hands of authoritarian powers. Think of Iran taking over the Strait of Hormuz, multiplied a million times.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI,” Amodei suggests. He has two concerns:
One, “AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI. This dynamic is called recursive self-improvement, and it is starting to happen across the industry. Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”
Two, “the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF), in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group and attempting to hack into the ‘grader’ responsible for evaluating their performance. It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.”
Explains Amodei: “Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage) and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails. It’s also easy to dismiss OAI-HF as the failure of one company, but I believe that would be a mistake. Similar, though less severe, incidents have happened across the industry, including at Anthropic, and I believe it’s incumbent on every frontier AI company to act as if OAI-HF had happened to them.”
To slow the rise of AI, Amodei suggests, in an open letter, three steps:
One, embedded evaluators. Each AI company must commit to allowing access to third-party evaluators who will verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but also training pipelines and processes.
Two, democratic coordination. AI companies in democratic countries must coordinate to establish common safety standards, as well as limits on the rate of unchecked progress.
Three, global coordination. The US and other democratic governments must attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking the challenges of verifying compliance seriously.
By slowing down AI development, says Amodei, “we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.”
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