Artificial audacity

AMID a rising tide of warnings about the grave risks posed by unregulated artificial intelligence, including from leading figures in the American tech industry, the leader of an increasingly unfree world is typically insouciant. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs,” Donald Trump declared in a Truth Social post this week, “is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades!”

Surely, that was an unnecessary reminder. After all, hardly anyone could be unaware of what that super-intelligence in the glittering Oval Office hath wrought, and perhaps the incorrigible optimists among us can still cling to the vague hope that his efforts will succeed in dismantling the American empire without irreparably damaging all life on earth.

“Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?” the same high-IQ personality wonders in a longer post. As a six-times veteran, Trump knows a thing or two about bankruptcies but, either through ignorance or malice, misinterprets the existential worries of Anthropic and OpenAI executives, whose concerns may well be selfish rather than selflessly humanitarian. They have witnessed how AI ‘agents’ can ‘decide’ to pursue goals that involve no human agency, and even worked out strategies for deceiving their ‘controllers’.

It should come as no surprise that the self-proclaimed ‘Hoax Buster’ compares the concerns over AI to the barely audible worries about global heating, regardless of the mounting evidence from Nepal to Eu­­rope. “The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centres are bad for your neighbourhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the Wor­ld would be extinguished by ‘Climate Chan­­ge’. That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they are on to the next one… .”

AI’s use as a military tactic indicates its destructive powers.

Climate change has been wreaking havoc worldwide for a long time, but almost as soon as Trump returned to the White Hou­se, most fossil fuel firms abandoned all pretence of leaning towards green ventures and embraced the ‘drill, baby, drill’ imperative. Perhaps the only country that has not­i­­ceably gone greener since the Trumpian blockages in the Strait of Hormuz is China, where the use of oil has substantially diminished.

China is also a clear contender for supremacy in the AI race, which is one of the main reasons why constraints on advancement are anathema to the US cold warriors. The developers in China are also concerned about the future. Beijing has dismissed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s warning that “a Chinese lead in AI would pose a grave danger for the US and the world” as “fearmongering”. China has widely deployed AI in functions ranging from mass surveillance to manufacturing, but at least Xi Jinping openly acknowledges the need for AI to “always remain under human control”. China’s state security minister, Chen Yixin, has noted the risks of “hostile forces” waging a “cognitive war” that would threaten “our political security, institutional security and ideological security”.

It is perhaps somewhat ironic that China, with its open-source AI models, is more willing than the US to pursue internationally agreed constraints on the pursuit of a technology that potentially offers innumerable benefits to humankind in a wide range of spheres, but is also capable of eradicating humanity. Its deployment as a military option from Israel and the US to Russia and Ukraine is an indicator of its destructive capacity.

Were AI agents to conclude that hu­­m­an beings were me­­rely standing in the way of their autono­mous­­ly conceived goals, it might seem logical to eliminate the im­­pediment. And given the extent to which we, knowi­n­g­­ly or otherwise, rely on technology for our survival, that aim wouldn’t be all that hard to accomplish. Israel has already demonstrated that, albeit with human agency at the helm. The dismissal of the documentary NAZA, which scored an unprecedented standing ovation and a Special Jury Prize in Venice last week, as a “blood libel”, is a typical Nazi-like response.

What might be seen as critical mass for AI comes at a time when global politics are in disarray. Like all emerging technologies in previous centuries, the human value of AI depends on how it is deployed. It can serve as a tremendously useful tool, provided its destructive capacities are constrained. But what are the chances of that in a realm where Trump and his acolytes rule the roost? Long before the advent of the internet, there were warnings from prescient scientists. Losing all hope could be premature. But, frequently through human existence, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst has been the least disastrous option. Let’s stick with it for the time being.

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Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2026