Will AI Destroy Us?

Will AI Destroy Us?

Last night a friend asked me directly whether I believe AI can or will destroy us. If we want to discuss such an important issue, let us be deliberate about it and consider all important stakeholders. Here is my answer.

This week Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and warned the world about the dangers of AI and its capacity to destroy humans. Hundreds of millions of people are now discussing whether AI can or will do this. On X alone his message has over 164M views. I think the discourse is important enough to look at it from the biggest picture possible.

The meeting nobody thought to hold

Imagine there is a popular and course altering design inside SpaceX that some engineers believe could eventually destroy the company and everyone in it.

Word spreads. Debate rages. Panels are convened. Probabilities are published. Serious people argue in public about whether the organisation will survive the year.

Now imagine that through every moment of it, nobody thinks to ask Elon Musk.

Not once. His judgement is never sought. His intentions are never considered. His authority over the thing he founded and funded and built never enters the conversation at all. The debate simply proceeds as though the founder does not exist or exists but has no standing in the matter of his own creation.

You would call that absurd. You would say the single most important variable had been left out of the model.

And yet this is precisely what we insist on doing.

We are speculating, at enormous volume and with real seriousness, about whether artificial intelligence will destroy humankind and even the planet. That is no small matter. And we are doing it as though the one who designed and created the planet and the human mind that built the machine has no influence on the outcome.

The destruction of humanity is a rather larger matter than the destruction of SpaceX. If we take the founder's view into account in the smaller case, it seems strange to leave the founder out of the greater one.

I believe our Founder has a say. And I am willing to try and consider His perspective. I hope you are too.

What I actually believe

Whether you believe it or not, God - however you define Him – is the creator of us and earth, His “family business”. If we are going to debate the possible destruction of what and who He founded, we had better attempt to consider His perspectives on the matter. I do not believe God – with His perfect Godly intelligence - will allow artificial intelligence to destroy His creation, without His own intervention.

I want to be careful here, because that sentence can be heard as complacency, and it is the opposite of what I mean.

I am not saying nothing bad will happen. I may be saying something much more uncomfortable than that.

Why He will allow the pain

Our Creator gave us agency – the power to decide.

Not as decoration. As the entire point. We were placed on His creation (earth) to choose, to be wrong, to bear consequences, and to grow through them. That capacity — to decide, and to become something through deciding — is a large part of what separates us from every other living thing.

And agency is not a gift you can give conditionally. A God who protected us from every consequence of our decisions would not have given us agency at all. He would have given us the appearance of it.

So He permits consequence. He permits us to build things we do not understand, to scale them faster than our wisdom grows, and to live inside the results. He has permitted every war, every famine of our own making, every institution we corrupted, across the whole of recorded history. He clearly understands something about agency we don’t. I suspect that something has to do with his infinite insights that stretch beyond space and time.

He will permit AI progression too.

Ask what the odds are that artificial intelligence causes serious disruption and real human suffering in the coming 3-5 years – directly or indirectly through humans - and the honest answer is not ten or fifteen percent. Judging by the entire history of our species with every powerful new capability, the odds are considerably higher than that.

But permitting harm and permitting annihilation are not the same thing. A father lets his child fail. He does not let the child die, if he can help it.

That is my answer to my friend. There will be disruption next to remarkable breakthroughs. There will be pain, some of it severe, much of it avoidable, most of it landing on people who had no part in the societal decisions. And there will not necessarily be an ending, because the ending is not ours to write.

Where the analogy really bites

Return to SpaceX for a moment, because this is the part that should worry us.

The engineers who ignore the founder do not destroy the company. The company outlasts them.

What happens to them is different. They spend years building in the wrong direction. They burn resources on designs the founder was never going to sanction. They are surprised by failures the founder could have warned them about. And eventually they are removed from the room, because a founder who is systematically ignored does not stay silent indefinitely.

That is our position exactly.

We are not going to destroy God's creation on our terms. But we are entirely capable of spending years building in a direction He would not have sanctioned if we cared to ask Him, at enormous human cost, and being genuinely shocked by the wreckage.

The people with the most power over this technology are, for the most part, building without any reference to the ultimate Creator and His bigger purpose. Not because they are necessarily wicked. Because the question never comes up or they choose to believe life and planet doesn’t have a designer or creator. And decisions made without reference to highest purpose are short-sighted and often selfish, however brilliant the people making them.

Every one of us must decide whether we are working with the Owner of this vast “family business”, or around Him.

So use the gift

If agency is the reason He permits the danger, then agency is also the answer to it.

This is not a passive theology. It is the most demanding one there is. It means the amount of suffering ahead is not fixed. It is being determined right now, by us, in decisions being made this year in boardrooms and ministries and schools.

So let us use it wisely, if that is not too much to ask.

Let us not scale AI to replace human beings. Let us scale it to grow them.

This is why we chose human advancement AI over human replacement AI. Every agent we build is designed to stand alongside a person and serve them — to develop their human capabilities, twenty-four hours a day, from a Grade 8 learner to a business executive to a senior politician, within their relevant domains. We are trying to use the most powerful invention ever produced by brains that God designed, to do what those brains and hearts were made for: to help human beings become more…faster.

Every institution that exists to develop people directly or indirectly can do this now, because of AI. Schools. Universities. Colleges. Companies. Families. Churches. Sports teams. Governments. A personal development partner, available always, for everyone.

That is the vision of Me-Vision Academy. Not my vision. The vision of me, of you, of our communities — of what a human being is actually for. It is the essence of Ubuntu.

The choice in front of your organisation

You are about to make this decision whether you intend to or not.

Here is an example I have written about before. Most organisations will appoint a Chief AI Officer, and that person's mandate will be productivity and margin. They will do their job well. And the human beings in that organisation will be optimised around, quietly, by people who never set out to harm them. Eventually people will be replaced.

I have argued instead for a Chief Human AI Officer — a Chief HAI Officer — whose mandate is the opposite: to ensure this technology is deployed to develop the people of that organisation, resulting in more productivity, creativity and optimisation, rather than to make them unnecessary.

The title is a small thing. The declaration is not.

Great or dreadful

We have extraordinary times ahead of us, and I use that word deliberately, because extraordinary can go either way.

How much disruption we suffer, how much pain we cause, how much of this we get right — all of it depends on how quickly we grow and scale the human powers that must govern this technology: agency, accountability, moral judgement, commitment, relationship, faith, hope and heart – purpose and love.

Superintelligence is coming into machines and into robots that will walk among us. How well we lead it will be decided entirely by the maturity and wisdom of the human beings holding the controls. No regulation, no alignment technique, no treaty – however important - will substitute for people who have become wise enough to hold what they have built.

Whether we scale that maturity, or fail to, will determine whether the next three to five years are remembered as great or as dreadful.

We are not here to destroy what has been created, or who has been created. We are here to learn, to grow, to apply our eight human powers in whatever domain we find ourselves, and to prepare for something much larger than this life.

Make a wise decision.

It is your first human power.

Adriaan Groenewald

adriaan@mevisionacademy.com

Human Advancement Infrastructure | Me-Vision Academy