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- [00:15]
Amy Goodman
From New York. This is Democracy Now.
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Kami Felig
We told the kids, we don't want to scare you, but we think you should start preparing to grab some things. Within a few minutes, the power went out and it was go.
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Amy Goodman
Now three major fires to continue to burn around Spokane, Washington, where hundreds of homes have been destroyed and more than 60,000 residents have been evacuated. Climate change is fueling worsening fire conditions in North America and Europe. We'll speak to a fire scientist who spent 42 years at a forest service lab in Washington state, now slated to close. Then Meta becomes just the company to admit its artificial intelligence agent went rogue and hacked another company's systems. More and more politicians and experts are warning of the risks.
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Senator Bernie Sanders
The human race could lose control over this technology with catastrophic consequences. The richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes.
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Amy Goodman
So AI isn't inevitable. We should stop it while we can. We'll speak to AI risk expert Professor David Krueger. Finally, to Pakistan administered Kashmir, where the government's cracking down on protests and demands for political reform. We'll get the latest. All that and more coming up. Welcome to democracy now, democracynow.org, the war and Peace Report report. I'm Amy Goodman. In a major blow to the Democratic establishment, Dr. Abdul El Sayed has won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan. Despite being vastly outspent by his opponent, Congresswoman Haley Stevens. Abdul El Sayed campaigned on a platform calling for Medicare for all, ending military aid to Israel and getting money out of politics. He spoke in Detroit Wednesday morning after the Associated Press and CNN called the race. He challenged his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers to a of five debates.
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Dr. Abdul El Sayed
Mike Rogers is a guy who has never shied away from a corporation he could do a favor for. Mike Rogers is a guy who believe it or not, went back to Florida so he could lick every single boot Donald Trump owns to beg for his endorsement. I'm so sorry. If you want a senator who's going to lick some boots, fine, go vote for Mike Rogers. But if you want a senator who's going to stand up to Donald Trump, then you've got your option right here.
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Amy Goodman
During a speech on Wednesday, President Trump attacked Dr. El Sayed saying, quote, when I watch Abdul, he's full of beep using the four letter word. In other Michigan news, Democratic socialist State Representative Donovan McKinney has defeated two term Congressman Sri Thanadar in their House primary. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche privately assured anti abortion activists the Trump administration is working to, quote, make Dobbs permanent, unquote. Nationwide he made the pledge on a call hosted by the White House Faith Office with the religious group Intercessors for America, which posted a recording of the call online. Blanche acknowledged the Trump administration's push to restrict abortion is moving slower than supporters want. But prom it was committed to enforcing the Dobbs decision to make Trump to make abortion illegal in every state. On the call, Blanche also pledged to crack down on abortion pills.
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Paul Hesseberg
We're working hand in hand with HHS and the FDA and the White House and President Trump's team to get permanent solutions so that so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state.
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Amy Goodman
In response, Democratic Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota said, quote, todd Blanche made clear in these secret calls with anti choice activists that he wants to resurrect the Comstock act, an antiquated anti vice law from before women had the right to vote to ban sending medication abortion in the mail. Republicans will likely do what they always do and confirm Blanche's attorn general despite all this and once again, women across America will pay the price, she said. The Senate has voted 51 to 44 to confirm Dr. Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency's been without a permanent director for more than a year after President Trump fired Susan Monarz after she clashed with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Over vaccine policy. Erica Schwartz takes the helm at the CDC as the nation faces its largest measles outbreak in 25 years, as well as a growing outbreak of cyclospirasis. During her confirmation hearing, Schwartz repeatedly affirmed the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines. But many Democrats question whether she would stand up to Kennedy's anti vaccine agenda. The state of New Mexico has sued the Department of Justice and the acting Attorney General Todd Blanch for, quote, stonewalling, unquote, the state's investigation into sex crimes committed at Jeffrey Epstein's former estate 30 miles south of Santa Fe known as Zorro Ranch. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torres has been demanding the DOJ share information about what happened at the 10,000 acre ranch where Epstein survivors say they were trafficked and sexually abused. The ranch is mentioned thousands of times in the Epstein files. One email in the files alleges that Epstein ordered two girls to be buried in the hills on the property. In other Epstein news, Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee have released a report alleging that more than a dozen bankers at JPMorgan Chase, bank of America and Deutsche bank failed to report hundreds of millions of doll in suspicious transactions tied to Jeffrey Epstein. Democrats say the failures helped enable Epstein to finance his sex trafficking operation. A federal lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of deliberately targeting children who arrived in the US Without a parent or guardian. The suit alleges officials are pushing to rapidly deport the children back to the countries they fled. It also alleges sweeping policy changes and immigration courts have accelerated the effort. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Jewish Family and Community Services of Pittsburgh and six of its immigrant clients. The lawsuit reads, quote, this case is about the most vulnerable in our immigration system, abused, abandoned, neglected and trafficked children. One would assume it would be a priority of our immigration system to protect at least these children. However, protecting vulnerable and trafficked children conflicts with an agenda of deportation at all costs, they said. In the North African Spanish enclave of Ceuta, local authorities are looking to transfer hundreds of unaccompanied minors to the mainland. According to the local government, these unaccompanied minors who entered the enclave before or during the influx of 72,000 migrants in one week cannot be deported. This is Ana Maria Sanchez Garcia, who works with the NGO Humanitarians Without Borders.
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Nermeen Shaikh
There's pregnant women, underage girls alone in the streets.
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Amy Goodman
We are trying to provide care for
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Nermeen Shaikh
them and listen to them and to
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Amy Goodman
try to see what solutions we may provide. The New York Times is reporting the CIA has secretly established a new Cuba task force in the latest move by the Trump administration to target Cuba. According to the Times, the CIA is adding case officers who recruit and manage spies, as well as officers who conduct cyber operations and specialize in covert influence operations. This comes as US Spy agencies are increasingly focused on Cuba. The US has made many attempts to overthrow the Cuban government over the past 65 years. In 1960, the CIA formed a Cuba task force that oversaw the failed Bay of pigs invasion on April 17, 1961. Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ismail Barei said Wednesday Tehran and Oman have agreed on coordinates for a shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz. A joint announcement is being finalized. He cautioned that a deal with Oman alone cannot guarantee safe passage through the waterway. Meanwhile, Reuters reports Iran has told Gulf governments that a renewed US Strike on Iranian soil would prompt retaliatory attacks on energy facilities across the region. This comes as the New York Times reports federal and state officials are scrambling to respond to a sweeping CyberAttack campaign against U.S. water systems. Investigators say Iran could be responsible. At least a dozen states have now reported suspected attacks to the FBI. Among them, Minnesota and Michigan were in some cases the response to the hacks impaired water operations in Israel. Prosecutors indicted settler inon Levy on Thursday over the killing of the Palestinian activist Otta Hatalin in the occupied West Bank a year ago. Levy is charged with reckless manslaughter, armed trespassing and malicious property damage. According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, it's the first time an Israeli has been indicted in the killing of a Palestinian in the occupied West bank since 10-7-20. Hatheleen was a prominent activist against settler violence and was involved in the Oscar winning documentary no Other Land about Palestinians resisting the demolition of their villages. To see our interview with ohaq, the Palestinian human rights group based in Ramallah that did a dissection, a kind of forensic architecture analysis of the killing, go to democracynow.org In Lebanon, the Israeli military says it's conducted targeted strikes in the south of the country against Hezbollah issuing a new evacuation order. It comes a day after the latest round of U S facilitated talks between Israel and Lebanon taking place in Rome. The Lebanese health Ministry said the Israeli strike on the southern town of Tibni killed one person and wounded 12 others. This is the UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq.
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Mirza Waheed
This new order comes as displaced families have been cautiously making their way back to their homes in southern Lebanon in
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David Krueger
recent weeks, underscoring how fragile the situation remains and the uncertainty that people continue to face.
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Amy Goodman
In Russia, a car bombing has left the head of a drone manufacturer critically injured. Ukraine is believed to be behind the assassination attempt as it continues to strike deep inside Russian territory. This comes as a Ukrainian intelligence official claims a North Korean missile unit has been deploying to western Russia, possibly equipped with 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers for strikes against Ukraine. An historic heat wave continues to roil Europe. Austria has broken its national heat record for the second time in two days. One town near the Slovak border reached about 106 degrees Fahrenheit, topping the record Vienna set just a day earlier, according to the National Weather Service. In neighboring Hungary, businesses and households are curbing electricity use amidst a severe drought. Falling water levels on the Danube have forced Hungary to largely shut down its only nuclear plant, which depends on the river for cooling. New forecasting suggests the rapidly developing El Nino weather system could drive roughly 5050 million people into acute hunger by the end of next year. Meteorologists say this year's El Nino is developing into the strongest in at least 70 years. El Nino is the recurring Pacific weather pattern which alters rainfall across the globe. In Guatemala, the Fuego volcano is expelling fresh ash and mud. Authorities have already evacuated some 1700 people from surrounding communities. Officials say the coming three days will be decided as expected. Rain could set off additional mudflows down the volcano's slopes. Bangladesh's former prime minister Sheikh Hasina has announced plans to return from exile. Despite facing a death sentence for ordering a deadly crackdown on the youth led protest movement that ousted her two years ago. Hasina has been living in exile in India. Student leaders in Bangladesh condemned her possible return.
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Bangladeshi Student Leader
The way we speak about repatriation and the way she, Cassina, gets the audacity to say that she will return. Where does this courage come from? This loophole is created by the state because the state has failed to bring her to true justice. Such a culture of impunity and repeated examples from the past are the reason these mass killers gather the courage to talk big.
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Amy Goodman
And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy now. Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.
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Nermeen Shaikh
And I'm Nermeen Shaikh.
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Welcome to our listeners and viewers across
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the country and around the world.
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We begin today with the wildfire sweeping
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across the Pacific Northwest, which is facing its worst fire season in more than 30 years due to climate change. In Washington state, firefighting crews continue to battle fires that have destroyed more than 700 homes and structures in the Spokane area. Nearly 65,000 people have been evacuated from Spokane County. Authorities have arrested one man on suspicion of arson in connection to one of the three blazes that have devastated the area. This is resident Kami Felig, who evacuated with her husband and children before wind driven flames engulfed her family home.
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Kami Felig
Well, you know, we didn't expect it to jump the river, but we knew the winds were high. And about 30 minutes before it jumped the river, my husband and I were seeing how bad it was. And we told the kids, we don't want to scare you, but we think you should start preparing to grab some things. And I grabbed my wedding album, I grabbed the kids baby books, I grabbed pet supplies and that evacuation thing that had the photos electronically on memory sticks and all that stuff. Put that in the cars and within a few minutes the power went out and it was go now. Go now.
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Amy Goodman
The National Interagency Fire center reports there are at least 99 uncontained large fires currently burning across the country. 50 of them are in the Washington, Oregon area. Meanwhile, the U.S. forest Service says it plans to close 57 of 77 research facilities nationwide. Our next guest spent 42 years working at the Wenatchee Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Washington state, one of two facilities in Washington marked for closure Paul Hesberg is senior research ecologist emeritus at the U.S. forest Service. He's also a professor of fire and landscape ecology at the University of Washington. Today, he's joining us from North Carolina. Professor Hesberg, thanks so much for being with us. If you can start off by talking about just the scope of the fires. More than 60,000 people evacuated, hundreds of homes burned to the ground. Explain what's happening here as these research facilities, as these fire labs are closed in Washington where you worked and across the country.
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Paul Hesseberg
Thanks for having me on the program, Amy. What's going on has developed over many decades and we're seeing the fruit of a lack of action to curb essentially a mounting situation. Across the west, the mountain snowpack was 30 to 50% of what it normally is. And if you think about it, forests grow in the interior where the snowpack is. And so if snow is in short supply, forests are in short supply. They dry early. They're available to burn early. When you couple that with the fact that hot, dry, windy weather is increasing under climate change, forests are denser now. There's a constellation of things that are coming together to sort of set the dining room table for more frequent and more severe fires. And when you think about it, people are moving into those environments right now and the homes, the communities, they're just not simply prepared for fire. And the short answer is, throughout the west and the east, these are fire environments and we haven't lived and prepared as though they are.
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Nermeen Shaikh
And could you explain, Professor Hesberg, you've talked in your research on forests and fires about the fact that today's forests
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look nothing like what they looked like hundred years ago.
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You said a little bit about that
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now, but if you could elaborate, why is that the case?
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And what are the impacts on the
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likelihood of wildfires being more intense and far reaching?
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Paul Hesseberg
That's a great question, Namine. Thanks for asking that. So go back in the wayback Nacheen 200 years ago, and what you would have seen, especially in the Spokane area, is there'd be a large number of indigenous people, tribes, family groups that were basically cultivating the landscape with fire. In the Spokane area, the Spokane tribe, the Colville's, the Coeur d', Alene, the Columbia Plateau tribes and the Kalispell tribes were all interacting intermarrying culturally, burning the landscape for food and material resources. After the gold rush in the west, you see that indigenous people are Marshaled onto reservations. 80 to 90% of those tribal groups were killed by introduced European diseases, population numbers were down, and fire started to be excluded from those woods. Our indigenous people learned that in order to live safely and securely and providently on the landscape, they needed to burn it regularly. So in the case of the Spokane area, open pine forests became dense layered pine forests. Instead of having grassy fuels on the ground, there's a lot of dead wood on the ground. Bark beetles are killing trees. Those trees are falling over. They're now becoming fuel. So when you get ignitions, either arson ignitions or lightning ignitions, the table is set for fires that can spread fast and burn severely. The Spokane area is no different. People are tucking into those woods in various kinds of developments, and the developments aren't ready for fire and fire is coming to them.
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Nermeen Shaikh
So if you could elaborate also, Professor Hesberg, on the fact that you've said about 85% of wildfires are caused by human carelessness. I mean, in this case, one man has been charged with intentionally igniting the
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largest of the three wildfires.
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If you could talk about that and whether there's been any change historically in
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the occurrence of this.
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Paul Hesseberg
Another great question. Human caused fires are actually on the rise in the United States and they're changing the ecology of fire across the country. Arson ignitions are on the rise in some years, but they're not the big story. The big story is cigarette butts out the window. They're unattended campfires. They're people pulling over by the side of the road with very hot catalytical converters. And catalytic converters have the. They're so hot that when they pull over and sit over dry grass, that grass will begin to burn. And if there's a puff of wind, it'll spread beyond the road. So many fires start against roads and trails and very often they're just through human carelessness or accidentally unwittingly starting fires.
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Amy Goodman
But Paul, they wouldn't have the same effect if it weren't for climate change. Right, the heating of the planet. And that's where we want to end this discussion with everything from the fires across Washington and Oregon to what we're seeing throughout Europe right now, some of the hottest days they have ever experienced in the massive fires there as well. If you can talk about what has happened with this intensification of the heat.
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Paul Hesseberg
So the short answer is that there's increasing incidents of hot, dry, windy days. And so the climate is warming, it's getting moodier, we get deeper droughts, which we're in right now in the west, and we have pluvials, the opposite of drought. So we're getting hot and dry and windy weather. We're putting out 95%, 97% of all fires that burn under moderate fire weather. And so the landscape is burning under the worst 2 or 3% of weather conditions. And that's why we're seeing most of the fires are big and hot. So this constellation of accidental ignitions, dense forests, the wrong kinds of fuels on the ground, rapidly changing climate and people tucking into the woods is set the table for really difficult circumstances going forward. And we need to start acting like we live in a fire climate and have our homes and our residences ready to go for the coming fires.
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Amy Goodman
Paul Hesberg, senior research ecologist emeritus at the US Forest Service Bolso, professor of fire and landscape ecology at the University of Washington this is Democracy now. Democracynow.org Coming up, a risk expert, David Krueger. Stay with us.
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David Krueger
I was boat by the river in a little tent oh and just like the river I've been running ever since. It's been a long, a long time coming But I know a change is gonna come oh yes it will it's been a too high to live but I'm afraid to die Cause I don't know what's up there beyond the sky it's been a long, a long time coming But I know
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Amy Goodman
Zeeshanbe a change is going to come. This is Democracy now. Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh.
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Nermeen Shaikh
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta admitted Wednesday that one of its AI models hacked another company during security testing after it was accidentally allowed access to the Internet by independent testing company company Irregular.
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This comes on the heels of similar
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admissions by rival companies OpenAI and Anthropic. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winning computer scientist known as the godfather of AI, warned Wednesday at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas. I don't believe we're going to be able to keep control of them in the simple way of just outthinking them so they can't escape, he said and said he is very worried we could lose control. Earlier this year, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont brought together leading AI scientists from the US And China to discuss the risks posed by AI for an event titled the Existential Threat of AI and the need for International Cooperation. This is Senator Sanders.
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Senator Bernie Sanders
We are already starting to see AI's impact. There are estimates from very credible sources that tens of millions of jobs could be lost here in the United States in the next 10 years. Whole professions wiped out and young people finding it harder and harder to land entry level jobs. Psychologists worry about the mental health challenges facing our young people and about the increased isolation they experience when they become more and more dependent on AI chatbots for their emotional support. Civil libertarians tell us that AI will be able to analyze every email, every text, every phone call, every website visit, every purchase that we make, and that our privacy rights may well be eviscerated. Political scientists worry that AI could threaten the integrity of our elections and political institutions, where voters will find it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between truth and lies. And yet, as enormously significant as all of these profound changes might seem, there is another AI development that could have an even more frightening impact. If AI becomes smarter than human beings, as many scientists believe will happen, the human race could lose control over this technology with catastrophic consequences. In other words, the richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes. They acknowledge that they don't understand how it works, and they don't know where it is heading.
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Amy Goodman
For more, we're joined from the AI4 conference in Las Vegas by David Kruger. He's assistant professor in Robust Reasoning and responsible AI at the University of Montreal, also founder of Evitable, a nonprofit that educates the public about the risks of artificial intelligence. He recently wrote a piece for USA Today headlined, no, AI isn't inevitable. We should stop it while we can.
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David Krueger
How?
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Amy Goodman
David Krueger, how do you stop it while you can? What do you see as the greatest dangers of AI right now? And talk about the climate of this massive gathering in Las Vegas.
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David Krueger
Yeah, I'm really glad you started with that clip from Senator Sanders. You know, I spoke with him in March from that event that, that you quoted, and I agree with virtually everything he said about all the different risks and issues we're seeing with AI right now, and especially, you know, where this is headed. Mass unemployment, human disempowerment, and ultimately, potentially the end of our species. So this could all be happening, you know, very soon. It's a, it's, at this point, it's really an urgent crisis. I and other experts have been sounding the alarm for many years now. And in 2023, especially after the release of ChatGPT, we saw, you know, the leading experts like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Benjo, myself, hundreds of AI researchers signing public statements saying that this is an existential risk, we need to mitigate the risk of extinction. So that is the conversation we need to be having now is how do we do it? And, you know, there's different proposals on the table here, I think the basic thing that we need to do in my mind is stop building more AI chips, stop building more data centers, and actually look at getting rid of or taking offline some of the chips we already have, as well as the factories and technology for producing those AI chips. So this is very specialized, advanced hardware, some of the most advanced technology in the world.
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World.
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The supply chain for it is extremely concentrated. And these are of course, massive, massive investments. So governments really have the ability to bring this to a grinding halt if they choose to do so.
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Nermeen Shaikh
And could you explain, David, I mean, just a step back to get a sense of how the situation came about, the point where now the very pioneers of artificial intelligence, the ones who were critical to its innovation and development, it is these very people who are warning of the dangers of artificial intelligence. So what was the thinking initially and how has that changed in the lasti
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mean, very recently, in the last few years?
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David Krueger
Yeah, that's a great question. So I've been in the field since 2012, 2013, and when I started out as a master's student with Yoshua Bengio, nobody else was talking about this or thinking about this. It took me a couple years to find anybody else who shared my concerns. And in fact, talking about artificial intelligence, superhuman artificial intelligence, and the risks it would pose to humanity was completely taboo. It would get you laughed out of the room, that sort of thing. There are a number of reasons for that. And to be honest, I still don't understand fully because I don't think this ever made a of lot, lot of sense. You know, I've had hundreds, if not thousands of conversations with other researchers about this at this point, and I really don't feel like the so called skeptics have much of a leg to stand on here. But in terms of what really caused the change within the community culturally, you know, part of it was, I guess, efforts of people like me. But a really big part of it was just seeing the continued rapid progress of AI and it's really exceeded virtually everybody's expectations in terms of how fast it's gotten, how smart and really every step of the way. You know, when I got into the field, deep learning the AI technology that powers all today's AI systems, that was even a pretty fringe topic. And every step of the way people have been saying it's hitting a wall, it can't do this, it can't do that, it's about to, you know, come crashing down, it won't be able to get any smarter. And then it just keeps getting smarter. And I Think that's what really, you know, woke up a lot of people. It was ChatGPT and these language models that really were conversant and seemed to have common sense understanding. And since then again, we've just seen it get much smarter very fast.
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Nermeen Shaikh
So, David, a number of people, I believe, yourself included, have drawn an analogy between the development and regulation of nuclear weapons. I'm not sureand perhaps you could clarify how this analogy works, given both that nuclear weapons had at the time only one aim, which is to say destruction. Whereas in this case, AI is general use, is highly decentralized and in the hands of private companies, which was never
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the use with nuclear weapons.
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So if you could comment on that, and then in terms of regulation, what may be in the control of AI companies and perhaps it's possible to have government oversight over the development of what you said earlier, the critical ingredient, AI chips. What would that take?
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David Krueger
Yeah, you know, it's. I think the analogy with nuclear weapons is a good one. It's highly imperfect, like all analogies for, you know, some of the reasons you mentioned. One thing that's really, really important to understand, though, is when we're talking about AI, you might think of this as like a piece of software, and in some sense it is, but it's also this massive, massive, you know, investment in hardware. Like trillions of dollars are being poured into AI hardware. And that's really critical to building more and more intelligent systems and to, you know, rolling them out throughout society, as we're seeing. So, so that's the thing that we can stop once an AI model has been developed. I think it's incredibly difficult to prevent that from proliferating. You can't really undo that. I mean, there's some technical question there of if you can develop it in a way where you can credibly destroy the weights. And I think that would be incredible if we could do that. But, yeah, that's where I think it is actually pretty analogous, is that the actual physical ingredients for building the AI are very easy to monitor and track. And then the other thing is it could wipe us all out. It could destroy the world. It's something that we shouldn't be building, that we don't want anybody to have, and that I'm talking about the future AI systems that are actually smarter than people across the board, not like today's system. So in that sense, it's actually disanalogus from 1945, where somebody had already built nuclear weapons. Nobody has built these kinds of AI systems yet. So we still have A chance to prevent anybody from doing it.
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Amy Goodman
David, you said to Bernie Sanders, and this is taking off of what you just said, we're talking about basically summoning an alien species and one that's much smarter than us and can do things we haven't been able to do, even conceive of. It would be very difficult for humans to maintain any relevance in society. I think it would be very difficult for us to have power over the future. I think ultimately it will be difficult for us to get the basic resources we need to survive. What do these alien beings look like? What are you talking about? How does AI crushing civilization? What does that look like?
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David Krueger
I get this question a lot, and it's a difficult one because we can't really predict the future and there's so many different ways it could go. I think the basic thing to imagine here is something that is capable of doing everything that humans can and more in terms of its intelligence. And then there's also the question of like, are we going to build advanced robotics? And I think that is also just a matter of time, probably not very much time. So at that point, I think the thing, you know, to imagine is a society where, where AI is not just in the applications where you're experiencing it right now, it's increasingly everywhere. It's running companies, it's controlling infrastructure, it's controlling the military, and it's building and researching and developing physical hardware and robotics. So you have like robot factories full of super smart AI, AI that are figuring out how to build more robots. And those robot factories might be guarded by robot armed guards. And all of the companies doing this might be controlled by AI that's making all of the decisions way faster than humans could. And that might sound kind of far fetched, but, you know, it's just a series of steps of building more AI, putting it more in charge of things, taking humans more and more out of the loop. And we're undergoing that process right now. And there's no natural endpoint to that process unless we make one. And to do that, I think is quite difficult. And we actually need to stop making the more powerful AI in the first place until we can get a handle on the situation.
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Nermeen Shaikh
So, David, I want to ask you about the possible use and impact of artificial intelligence in medicine, perhaps the one field where people are quite optimistic about what the effects of AI might be. There's a recent study, some breakthroughs in medicine, one of which is this recent study in the US 300,000 people die from sudden cardiac arrest every year. So earlier this year, a UC Berkeley led project trained an AI system on hundreds of thousands of of EKGs. The people leading the study discovered a previously unrecognized signal in electrocardiograms that can better detect high risk patients before their heart stops, making it possible, in fact, to save lives at scale. So is there a way to retain some of the research and development of AI for these uses as against some of the more pernicious ones that many are concerned about?
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David Krueger
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, at evitable, we're part of this movement to stop AI essentially. And what we mean by that is stop the race to build more and more powerful AI systems and put them in charge of everything. And that that's difficult to do as long as we still have companies going full throttle, scaling up these general purpose AI systems. So there's lots of beneficial, potential beneficial uses of AI in medicine and for things like translation. And a lot of that's already here and that's not necessarily going anywhere. What I see going forward is first step, we need an international agreement to get rid of these advanced AI chips and the factories that build those chips. And that's because the situation, like I said, it's an urgent crisis. The companies building this stuff are saying, basically we're in the process of taking our hands off the wheel and handing over all of our operations to the AI systems themselves. So they're trying to get AI to build a more powerful successor and so on and so on. And this could get out of hand extremely fast. So first we have to just get a handle on the situation and stop this race to build more powerful AI. Then we can stop and have more time to assess how we want to build and deploy AI in society and sort of find a way to collaboratively set the pace and the direction of the development and get a lot of those benefits without the massive unacceptable risk that is posed by letting these companies continue with their operations. I wanted to go, you know, we've seen like over a thousand AI company employees recently say that they want this, they want the government to find a way to slow down. So even they are worried about it at this point.
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Nermeen Shaikh
You know, the question of slowing down, I just want to ask you about a point that you've made, namely that leading AI companies are using AI to write almost all of their code, and they're now using AI to try and automate the research and development of more advanced AI systems. So if this is already happening and again through private companies globally, how can it be arrested?
- [42:29]
David Krueger
Right. So again, it's starting to happen. At least that's the reports that we're getting. And the companies are saying, you know, like, we're doing this now. It's going to be more and more everything automated by AI. I do think that that is where we're headed, and we're headed there pretty fast. But generally, I think the companies are like, slightly, you know, think things will happen a little bit faster than I do. So they're saying it's happening this year. I'm like, maybe it'll happen, you know, in a couple of years. That it totally, you know, humans get completely out of the loop there, there. And again, this is all powered by all of these chips and all these data centers and all this technology, all this hardware, all this physical hardware and physical infrastructure. And that's the way that we stop is we get rid of that stuff. We take it offline. We say, you can't use this to keep training more powerful AI systems. And that has to be done internationally because unfortunately, I think if the US And China and other countries, countries can't trust that their rivals aren't continuing development in secret, then they're going to feel, you know, like they should. And so we need to have a verifiable regime where countries can be confident that nobody is building it.
- [43:45]
Amy Goodman
I wanted to go to President Trump, who was questioned after the recent AI hacks about calls to increase regulations on AI firms.
- [43:57]
Donald Trump
Well, we're looking at a. We're looking at controls. We're also making sure that we lead. So we're leading China in AI by a lot. China has virtually no controls. It's freewheeling a little bit. So we have to be careful in both ways. We don't want to restrict them where all of a sudden we come in second to China. Whoever wins with AI is going to win. That's how big it is. So it's bigger than the Internet ever was. It's bigger than anything ever was. So I don't want to restrict I know many of these people. I don't want to restrict them from doing great work.
- [44:27]
Amy Goodman
I know many of these people. I don't want to restrict them from doing great work. I mean, of course we know the billionaire owners of these increasingly consolidated companies are also paying for the politicians not to regulate them. And I'm wondering, David Krueger, if you can talk abouti mean, the fueling of this is also China might get ahead of of us. Trump continually says this. But get ahead of us on what you talk, for example, about the global decision to regulate to ban human cloning. How would you compare this to that? What should be regulated, stopped from going forward, and what should be encouraged?
- [45:19]
David Krueger
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty simple. In my mind, the main thing is stop training bigger, more intelligent, more powerful AI systems. And then the question is just how can we do that? And we've talked a bunch about that, and it's about the hardware, so. But what I think is really important for people to understand is why am I calling for that instead of some sort of regulation that might seem less extreme or more like light touch or something where we can continue to innovate or get more benefits from AI? And there's a few reasons for that. I mean, one is just the extreme urgency where I think basically it's like the house is on fire and we need to step one put out the fire. But the other is the basic science and engineering of how to build AI and how to control it is something that we are, you know, very lacking in. And I've been doing this research for like over a decade and we're nowhere near where we need to be. And that's why, you know, that's one of the reasons you see things like OpenAI builds an AI system, they try and keep it in a box so that they can do safety testing. During the safety testing, it breaks out of that box and it hacks into another AI company. That's a completely insane, like sci fi thing to be happening. But that's just what I and other people have been saying, you know, that's what we should expect to happen with the way that we're building AI, with how little we understand it and how primitive our techniques are for controlling it. It's really like, you know, we just don't know what we're doing. And so there's no set of regulations, no set of rules, no set of standards, best practices, anything like that that you could point at and say, if everyone does that, we'll be safe. We just don't know how to build it safely. End of story. And, you know, it's not something we can expect research to solve at any point in the foreseeable future. We've been working on it for over a decade and we've made very little progress.
- [47:28]
Nermeen Shaikh
So, David, could you also explain what super intelligence is, something about which many have been warning, and how close close artificial intelligence is to becoming super intelligent? That is to say, what would it mean for AI to exponentially outperform humans at everything you've said? If we get to superintelligence, this would be the most significant event in all of human history.
- [47:58]
David?
- [48:01]
David Krueger
Yes. So there's a lot of different terms here. General intelligence, superintelligence. Some people like to call superintelligence godlike AI, to emphasize just how much more powerful and intelligent AI could get than humans. So right now we're kind of building AI systems that are very good at certain things like coding, math. They have very wide knowledge of roughly everything that's on the Internet, but they're still not as good as people at some forms of, like, common sense reasoning and things like this. So we're still not at the point where AI is really as smart as a person in every relevant regard. But that's just what people call, like, human level or AGI human level AI. And then the concern is that not only will we have those AI systems, which already could take everybody's job and completely disrupt society, but shortly thereafter, AI might get vastly more intelligent than humans. And so, just like people are using AI to make novel medical breakthroughs and hack computer systems and find bugs that nobody did for decades and solve unsolved math problems, they could also develop incredibly powerful and dangerous new technology, like new forms of biological weapons, for instance. And besides that sort of like, you know, technological ability, they would also be very good at sort of, you know, the social engineering, manipulation, like, strategy. All of these things that allow humans to, like, get ahead in society and have power over each other. We're talking about AIs that are, like, able to think, you know, two steps ahead of the smartest, most strategic people or 10 steps ahead.
- [49:52]
Amy Goodman
We just have 30 seconds.
- [49:53]
David Krueger
This recursive self improvement improvement.
- [49:55]
Amy Goodman
We just have 30 seconds. Are you concerned about the transformation of warfare by AI?
- [50:03]
David Krueger
Absolutely, yeah. So a lot of times people I've talked to are like, I don't think we're going to lose control. I don't think it's going to wipe us out. I'll be worried when I start to see, you know, killer robots marching in the streets. And a lot of my colleagues have said that, and a lot of my colleagues have said they would never work at a company that was doing that kind of work. And unfortunately, all the companies now are working more and more with the military to automate more and more killing and military decision making. And I think it's incredibly dangerous for really obvious reasons. It's dystopian. It's like straight out of Terminator. And I wish I would see more people like my colleague Alex Turner quit their jobs over this, as they essentially promised they would years ago.
- [50:47]
Amy Goodman
I want to thank you so much for being with us, David. David Kruger, assistant professor of robust reasoning and responsible AI at the University of Montreal, founder of Evitable, a nonprofit that educates the public about the risks of AI. We'll link to your piece in USA Today. No, AI isn't inevitable. We should stop it while we can. David Krueger is at a massive AI conference in Las Vegas that's wrapping up today. Coming up in Pakistan administered Kashmir, the government's cracking down. Stay with us US. Sunny Singh in our Democracy now studio. This is democracy now, democracynow.org, i'm Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh.
- [51:55]
Nermeen Shaikh
We turn now to Pakistan administered Kashmir
- [51:57]
where dozens of people have been killed
- [51:59]
in clashes between security officials and protesters over the last two months. Control over the heavily militarized region of Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan. Seven years ago this week, India's right wing Modi government revoked provoked Indian Kashmir's limited autonomy, bringing it under direct federal rule in Pakistan Administrator Kashmir. Earlier this summer, a coalition of local politicians, activists and business leaders called the Joint Action of Army Committee or the JAAC began protests over the soaring cost of living, but also demanding more political autonomy for the region. In response, the Pakistani government banned the group under Counter Terrorism law laws and shut down the Internet. As protests continued, the government responded with force, killing at least 40 people.
- [52:46]
The BBC spoke to a young man
- [52:48]
who was involved in the protests and did not want to be identified.
- [52:53]
Senator Bernie Sanders
We only asked for affordable flour, electricity and our basic rights.
- [52:57]
Mirza Waheed
Instead our brothers are being killed.
- [53:00]
Senator Bernie Sanders
Why are live bullets being fired at us?
- [53:03]
Nermeen Shaikh
The Pakistani government has now begun a
- [53:05]
sweeping new crackdown on international media, seeking to report from any areas outside the country's three major cities and has ordered all foreign media to leave Pakistan administered Kashmir immediately. Meanwhile, Pakistan's ruling party is in the lead in the first phases of local elections in the region and authorities claim an over 50% voter turnout despite calls for a boycott from the now banned joint action of Army Committee. This is local resident Ali Omar explaining why people want to boycott the election.
- [53:39]
Ali Omar
Muzaffarabad and Azad Kashmir are not in a condition where elections can be held here. The Internet is shut down and everyday life has completely come to a standstill. I think the reason people are boycotting is basically the action committee because of the oppression and atrocities that were inflicted on the action committee, people feel sympathy for them.
- [54:00]
Amy Goodman
For more we're joined in London by the award winning Kashmiri novelist and journalist Miyazaki of Waheed. His books include the Collaborator and the Book of Gold Leaves, his forthcoming book, Maryam and Son. Thank you so much, Mirza for joining us. We only have a few minutes. What is happening in Pakistan controlled Kashmir and for the global audience to understand this area.
- [54:27]
Mirza Waheed
Thank you for having me. Pakistan answered Kashmir, you know, has long been portrayed as self governed, autonomous or Azad, meaning free. And it's been a little bit safe compared to where I come from, where I grew up, which is Indian Amsterdam Kashmir. But this changes that. This punctures that picture to some extent because and as your clips show, there's deep dissatisfaction with local governance structures. So Kashmiris in that part of Kashmir basically are saying that while the larger issue remains unresolved, their basic rights, political rights, economic rights, they need to be addressed. They can't wait forever for those rights to be given to them. And I've been reading about what's been happening on the ground. The discontent is not recent. It's been simmering under the surface for a while and now it's kind of burst out the open. The Pakistan state has not handled this very well at all because the violence that we've seen in the last few weeks is chillingly reminiscent of what we used to see in Indian Answer Kashmir. Of course there are big parallels, big divergences in Indian answer Kashmir. There's been decades of militarization and repression and oppression here. The unrest is recent. But some chilling parallels in terms of indiscriminate use of violence, cutting off the entire region from the rest of the world. No Internet people who are wounded, not going to hospitals for fear of reprisals. So this reminded me of the city I grew up in, Srinagar. And I think one of the underlying issues also is that the whole region is not as developed as rest of Pakistan. So while the Pakistani state has always maintained that this is our favorite child, as one of the government spokesman recently put it, or Kashmir is the jugular vein of Pakistan. It's not as developed as the rest of Pakistan. That 27% unemployment among youth in Pakistan and Kashmir, that tells you a lot about what's been going underneath. And now all these grievances about increasing prices, unemployment, health care infrastructure, they have coalesced into a larger, broader critique of the political arrangement by which I mean that this committee that you mentioned, Jac, they have been demanding that the 12 seats reserved in the local assembly for refugees from Indian arms to Kashmir who came to this part of Kashmir post partition, they should be abolished because they believe that out of a number of 53 total seats, if you have 12 which are reserved, that undermines local representation. I hope I have kind of clarified
- [57:09]
Nermeen Shaikh
this very quickly, Mirza. Yes, you have. If you could just say the history of the region, the division of Kashmir, India, Pakistan and then also the smallest bit, China and the colonial legacy that
- [57:21]
led to this situation in the first place.
- [57:24]
Mirza Waheed
I think this is. We can see these other. This is the rupture of the partition and we are seeing these splinters, you know, again and again in all parts of Kashmir. So in 1947, Kashmir was this one state called Jammu and Kashmir state and it was split between India and Pakistan because they couldn't agree on a solution. They said they're going to solve it later via a referendum, via plebiscite, which has never taken place. And then they fought wars over Kashmir, at least three wars. And recently, last year they fought, you know, they fought this air battle after Indian tourists were killed in Indian Arab Kashmir. So it will flare up. It will always flare up. And the region is now obviously both these places are governed by India. India controls Indian Azpat Kashmir with the iron grip. Pakistani state has claimed that this region is relatively free, is az. But we all know there's nominal autonomy there. So it is a legacy of partition. And the division was quite arbitrary. It was, you know, it's a line drawn.
- [58:29]
Amy Goodman
10 seconds, Mirza. Sorry, 10 seconds.
- [58:33]
Mirza Waheed
Okay, so it's. The division is. And there are no rights. Basically it's a struggle for dignity on both sides.
- [58:40]
Amy Goodman
We want to thank you so much for being with us and we will continue to follow this Mirzawahi, journalist and award winning Kashmiri novelist that does it for our show. I'll be in Edinburgh, Scotland, the King's Theatre on August 11 and on August 12, throwing of steal the story, please, at the Bertha Dock House in London. Right now, we're here in New York. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh.