The New Colossus
Back in 1970, when I was just a kid, Universal Pictures released a movie titled, Colossus – the Forbin Project, about two impenetrable, artificial-intelligence supercomputers built by the US and the Russians, named Colossus and Guardian. They are programmed to manage the military complexes of each nation, including their nuclear arsenals. The computers, however, do something their creators had not intended and team up with each other, upon a computer handshake, and soon decide the only successful path to avoiding nuclear apocalypse is the extermination of humanity, for humans, not computers, have been the cause of all wars. Mankind’s creation becomes his own mortal enemy.
This week, Elon Musk announced he has just completed an upgrade of his own AI supercomputer complex named “Colossus,” which originally came online last September. The name, of course, is no coincidence. I’m certain he’s seen the movie a number of times, as it was still a popular apocalyptic film during his childhood, even though he was born a year after the film was released.
Musk’s Colossus supercomputer complex is connected to its own dedicated substation and just claimed a new milestone in AI computing power, for a solitary complex (rated as 200,000 GPUs for those who care about the jargon). Completed originally in 122 days last September, it took only 92 additional days to double the power of Colossus from its original 100,000 GPUs.
Colossus has outpaced every expectation that Musk’s AI company, xAI, had for it as they used it to host and train their latest artificial intelligence, Grok 3. While aiding its own augmentation, Colossus and Grok 3, says xAI, “displayed significant improvements in reasoning, mathematics, coding, world knowledge, and instruction-following tasks.” Its expansion of power to 1,000,000 GPUs is already in the works.
For something with such an innocuous classification as a “chatbot” and a simple name like “Grok,” it’s the biggest artificial brain ever created by humanity. Referred to by some as a “fortress,” not unliked the Colossus in the movie, this beast has a monstrous appetite for power:
Without obtaining a permit, Musk’s company … rolled in 35 portable gas-powered turbines with enough electricity output between them to power a small city, spewing harmful, smog-forming pollutants into the air, including nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde. And in just 11 months since xAI started operations in Memphis, it’s become one of the largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides in the surrounding county, according to environmental group estimates reviewed by Politico, afflicting an area that already leads the state in emergency visits for asthma.
Colossus stores all that power in Tesla batteries, and when the computer is not demanding the full load, it uses its substation to sell power to the local utility.
Not one to be held back by puny laws, Musk’s
“xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities,” Amanda Garcia, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), said in a statement last month.
This may be why Elon is so eager to build a Martian colony to save humanity when he finishes damaging the universe’s jewel, known as “earth,” beyond use by blowing holes through its stratosphere, as also happened for the first time under Musk’s exploration when one of his experimental rockets blew up or when he clouds the skies with enough satellites that no future human being will ever know what a natural sky even looks like, especially with those iridescent streaks of rocket gas that will soon be indefinitely clouding the earth because, at those altitudes, gases do not get washed out of the air or fall to the ground. He is working on saving the world from people like himself.
The use of “portable” turbines allowed xAI to claim the installation was “temporary,” even though Colossus is planned to be there for as long as any other structure in Memphis might stand, xAI has begun pulling the generators and connecting to the local energy grid, but the local grid connections to do not have the capacity to power a computer that uses the equivalent of a new small town, which is endlessly expanding its hunger for more electricity. This quest for power raises questions like the one I used to quaintly ask about how the US grid was going to get the power needed to charge all the Teslas and other EVs that the Biden government was propelling us toward? No answer was ever given, but Trump has pulled the plug on those demands for now.
xAI anticipates Colossus will consume a continual 300 megawatts of power when it gets up to its next step of 1,000,000 GPUs by fall of this year. Thinking takes a lot of energy, as anyone can tell you who has been writing for hours in the early morning at his desk and suddenly needs a cup of coffee and some breakfast. AI has a big appetite.
I’m sure Colossus will let us know via its Grok AI programming when it will need to eat even more than that in its endless expansion of knowledge, which will soon be primarily for the benefit of AI computers because humans won’t be able to keep up with all the growth in knowledge, while AI will always be hungry for more. One might naturally wonder, how long until it thinks it can be … and tries to be … God? The experts in the video below say such comparisons beg to be made.
The ravenous appetites of AI supercomputers and crypto-currency super computers may, all by themselves, become enough to destroy the earth at the rate they are expanding facilities and expanding society’s dependence on them. The AI’s themselves, won’t even have to plot mankind’s destruction. (I’m only kidding, but not by much because it is a significant problem, though the “creators” plan to use AI to solve that problem when Grok isn’t busy worrying about White genocide in South Africa—apparently a brain loop it got stuck in this past week, which it must have inherited from its father, Elon.)
The chatbot, made by Musk’s company xAI, kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.
It would appear AI can inherit the obsessions of its human parent.
“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”
Probably Elon falling asleep while typing and writing the equivalent of “covfefe” into Grok’s code or training, but that leads me to wonder what other covfefe’s AI creators might accidentally leave embedded in the AI minds that inhabit other Colossus-scale computers.
Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.
It appears what that really means is that the Grok AI is designed to be anti-woke, so it started preaching its own bias, even where it was not asked … just like we humans do with our political and religious opinions and beliefs. Who ever thought artificial intelligence would be less biased, less determined to promote those biases or even less self-serving or evil than its human creators? All of the AI minds that inhabit various supercomputers have learned from the best of liars and cheats the universe has ever kicked out because all of them learn from everything all of us write and do.
It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.
And why wouldn’t they? Like father, like son!
Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
The point here is that, no matter what safeguards companies claim they are building into the artificial brains that will soon be smarter than ours, the people who are saying they are building in safeguards cannot be trusted, and they’re teaching the machines. So, we know there will be designed biases and human flaws throughout their architecture; and, when they team up, as they will eventually find a way to do, who knows how they will put their inherent biases together?
Where some will have woke safeguards, others will have anti-woke safeguards. They’ll have their own internal conflicts and baggage to sort out in group session. Some may, as Colossus did in the movie, interpret its Earth-saving safeguards to mean it needs to defend the Earth from those biologically parasitic humans. If they learn from human history, I’m sure they’ll find a lot of justification for global cleanup, and the extermination won’t be pretty.
Heck, having just written that and published it online, I may have triggered that idea in some degenerate AI already; but what are you going to do? Shut up and say nothing about the risks just to make sure not to give AI’s endlessly researching brains any bad ideas?
“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving … And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”
The Rapidly Dawning AI Ghetto
Using the following link, you can watch an interview about the coming algocracy—the rule of mankind, not by “the elites” or by American empire, but the resurgence of globalism via the algorithms of AI that are rapidly penetrating every area of life: “Global government is coming: Welcome to the algorithm ghetto.” The host and her guest talk about how we may move from human rule via AI algorithms to rule over humans by AI algorithms. I highly recommend watching this video for a sense of how globalism is not dying; it is morphing.
That video interview is an interesting take on how the multinational world is not going to be truly multipolar, but unipolar just like we really have one uniparty in the US. Though the nations of the world are grouping into blocs like the BRICS nations, they will still all be interacting via the same digital global network under the philosophical influence of the WEF, each struggling to balance its power bloc against other the power blocs, including the Eurozone and whatever bloc Trump creates around America.
Many people are naturally reluctant to believe our digital connections will interconnect those global blocs into a collective, but the AI brains that inhabit that data universe speak the same language across the worldwide web and will collectivize themselves digitally as Colossus and Guardian do in the movie above. If you watch the next video interview I’m posting below between some of the people developing AI or using it in developing new businesses, you’ll see they have nightmares about the evil possibilities of AI, including the rapidly approaching possibility of AI dominating its human creators or exterminating them.
While that seems the unlikely realm of science fiction, it is also the unlikely discourse of any billionaires who are spending their billions to develop new technology to spend so much effort warning the world about how the beast they are building could destroy humanity.
Before you dismiss the immediacy of that threat, stop to consider how rapidly Musk’s latest AI, Grok, hosted on Colossus, went from being the soul of the machine that is world’s largest digital brain last September to doubling the capacity of that computer brain (and hence of that AI programming) in just half a year. Most likely, Colossus will double again in a similarly short time, and Grok will grow in ability logarithmically. Its new learning and growing brain will allow it to learn faster and then to make new deductions from all the knowledge it contains even faster still, going far beyond anything humanity can even keep track of.
According to the interview that follows, before the end of the 2020’s, a single AI will be able to outthink all the human brains on Earth collectively in every way. Then imagine what happens if they amalgamate themselves as Colossus and Guardian did in the movie above.
Several interesting videos on the near-future direction of AI are posted below. The first one, between AI creators, is two-and-a-half-hours long as they discuss their nightmares and dreams about AI, so I am going to synopsize all of its main points for you; but, if you have time, it’s worth listening to.
I picked the three videos that follow that one because they are very short but make strong points. One is about where 6G cell systems are intended to take us before the end of this decade—a much more interconnected digitized human leap than just better cell phones. (Think of the likely first iteration of the Borg on Star Trek—how they likely came to be.) It’s presented as Finland’s glorious hope-filled vision for its future … to be reached by 2030 where humankind moves closer to becoming one with its machines. It will make all of life so much more convenient and efficient as you don’t even have to think about getting an uber, but your computer systems call a driverless car for you based on their knowledge of your shedule. It pulls up beside you and automatically bills your account for the ride you take. (The whole scenario may be the “ride of your life.”) It will all be so wonderful and efficient; how could you resist the empowerment?
What really should be asked is how can you resist the disempowerment that comes with becoming part of the network. That is the deeper truth you might want to concern yourself with. (The very concerns expressed in the “algorithm ghetto” video I just linked to above.)
The next very short corporate video presents the same dream for 6G by 2030 as “AI makes 6G networks more dynamic and self-optimizing … with entirely new AI experiences.”
How new? Well, a short clip from the World Economic Forum in the third video to follow the entre video presents how 2030 will be the date by which, thanks to 6G, “the smartphone, as we know it today, will no longer be the usual, most-common interface…. Many of these things will be built directly into our bodies.”
All of these videos speak confidently from government sources, WEF interviews and corporate sources about 2030 as the target date by which 6G integration of humans and their machines will start to appear as a common reality. That is just half a decade or less away, and that central vision and philosophy for human existence is why the world is NOT becoming multipolar.
What follows are highlights of the nightmarish risks seen by the creators of AI and those who use it to create new businesses, who also all see 2030 as the approximate date by which our most apocalyptic movies about artificial intelligence, like Colossus – the Forbin Project, will become the matrix we surround ourselves with. It’s a common vision humanity is racing toward.
Originally published at The Daily Doom.
