Act in Haste, Repent At Leisure

"My position at the time was that an allegation was all that  person should require to come to the conclusion that an accused person was guilty, and I accused those who disagreed with this of doing harm to survivors."

"I should have understood that supporting people who come forward about sexual violence does not require, and cannot justify, acting in ways that may lead others to conclude that unproven allegations are true, or failing to give the person accused a fair opportunity to be heard and considered."

"I should not have listened only to one side, or allowed that one-sided understanding to shape  my communications, my tweets, or my participation in the process. I also should not have allowed my own past negative experiences with others, or my experience learning about and working on issues of sexual violence, to cloud my judgment or prevent me from giving Mr. Galloway fair consideration." 

Chelsea Rooney, author, UBC creative writing program alumna

People walk past large letters spelling out UBC at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on Nov. 22, 2015. The Supreme Court of Canada has dismissed an appeal by accusers of former University of British Columbia writing professor Steven Galloway, paving the way for his defamation case to go to trial. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

 

The 2015 event that caused a talented and admired professor of creative writing at University of British Columbia to be fired, illustrated starkly the delicacy with which women who accuse men of sexual impropriety are handled, as opposed to such allegations with total lack of proof which can taint an accused man for life whether or not he happened to be guilty or merely the victim of a spiteful female scheme to embarrass and ultimately destroy a man's reputation, social standing and employment.

 

By no means should charges of rape be handled with anything other than professional detachment to a criminal act which, when and if proven in a court of law, that calls for appropriate justice to be meted out in a prison sentence. By no means should a charge of this serious social and personal assault be taken as truthful revelation without evidence of some nature as proof of the crime having been committed. Yet a man totally innocent of the charge, without trial, could be consigned to the deepest heat of social condemnation.

 

Believing all women who come forward with charges of sexual misconduct against a male is almost visceral, and that is because most if not many women have at some time in their lives experienced inappropriate and sometimes criminal sexual abuse at the hands of a male relative, friend, acquaintance, co-worker, stranger in a casual or life-altering event or series of events that dissipates trust in the innocent intentions of all males.

 

Chelsea Rooney is the author of Pedal, a debut novel published with Caitlin Press and a finalist for the 2015 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, co-presented with The Walrus. Pedal was also nominated for the 2015 ReLit Award. Bio

 

Chelsea Rooney had no doubt in her mind that a professor she knew personally and had reason to have trust in, had sexually assaulted another University of British Columbia student in his class, as that student, unidentified by name but referred to as 'A,B,' claimed to have occurred years beforehand. Her conviction, without proof, prior to investigation -- which in the end was found by a retired judge whom the university tasked to investigate found unsubstantiated -- led her to embark on a mission to question other students to probe for similar abuse claims among them.

 

Instagram

She in fact, led a campaign to completely isolate and disengage Steven Galloway, as a sexual offender, someone persona-non-grata in polite society, undeserving of trust, much less that of a respected member of the professoriate at a well-regarded university. She took the step of urging others who "either experienced or witnessed incidents that can speak directly to our subject's character" to contact the media. The university obliged by suspending Professor Galloway, while formally extending their appreciation to his accuser, Rooney.

 

The investigation, conducted in 2016 by a retired judge, concluded following Professor Galloway's firing by the university, that the sexual assault had not in fact occurred. Further, that the additional complaints that Rooney had presented were "without merit". This was a story that had garnered national attention and with it, national condemnation. Of a kind no university seeks, and which no doubt helped spur its decision to terminate the accused man in June of 2016.

 

Now, Chelsea Rooney has second thoughts all those years afterward, referring to "serious and unproven allegations". Whereas when Professor Galloway had been cleared of wrongdoing through the investigation, she had stated to news media that the investigation report felt to her like "yet another slap in the face", for women whose claims of sexual violation should be believed unconditionally.

 

One can only wonder whether this complete alteration in Professor Galloway's one-time chief accuser's orientation and drive for punitive justice to be done could have anything much to do with the defamation lawsuit launched by former Professor Galloway in 2018 to clear his reputation. A trial date of October 5 was set. A pre-trial court hearing in 2021 on the lawsuit aired details in her determined damning of a man with whom she had positive professional experience with. And with whom she has settled. Her current disclaimers a matter of overdue conscience.

 

Writer Steven Galloway is pictured in his office at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on March 31, 2014. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

 

"I am aware that prior to A.B. making these allegations, Mr. Galloway considered me a friend and had on multiple occasions gone out of his way to help me, with nothing asked in return."

"In my 2014 book I thanked him as someone 'who encouraged me to commit to writing at a very important time in my life'. That was a true statement." 

"I know that nothing I say now can undo the harm or give back the years affected by these events, but I am genuinely sorry for the part I played in causing that harm."

Chelsea Rooney, Steven Galloway accuser 

 

The Unspeakable Tragedy at Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia

"British Columbia is filing a lawsuit against OpenAI in California for its failure to notify law enforcement of threats made on its platform prior to the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School."

"This case highlights the urgent need for strong national safeguards for artificial intelligence technologies and online platforms. Our government has consistently advocated for measures to protect people, especially children and youth from online harms."

"I have written to federal ministers [Minister of Justice Sean] Fraser, [Minister of Artificial Intelligence Evan] Solomon and [Minister of Canadian Identity Marc] Miller with clear policy ideas to amend the Criminal Code of Canada to ensure a pathway to human accountability for AI's actions."

British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma 

B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma is calling for changes to the Criminal Code in the wake of reporting on the alleged conversations between the Tumbler Ridge mass shooter and ChatGPT. (Ben Nelms/CBC, Kiichiro Sato/The Associated Press)

 

"In response, Chat GPT explained why such violent content would be flagged -- and then offered tips on how to evade its own safeguards."

"It advised Van Rootselaar to always frame ... content as fictional or hypothetical in order to 'never get flagged again by OpenAI's moderation systems."

"[Over the next eight months, Van Rootselaar] discussed building and using firearms and homemade explosives, fantasized about becoming a notorious mass killer and asked about the timing of previous real-world school shootings."

"To have a chatbot engage in this way was, I think, quite astonishing. It's very troubling, because this is a person who has been already talking, for quite a while, about some very dark and disturbing things." 

Mark Follman, journalist, Mother Jones 

An RCMP vehicle is parked outside Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in February 2026.

 

Transgender-identity, biological male Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, set out on February 10 of this year to commit a mass atrocity. Before leaving his home he shot his mother to death, along with his half-brother. That out of the way he made his way to the high school he had attended, to wreak mayhem and havoc there, carrying the lethal weapons that would enable him to pursue his deadly goal. He took the life of a teacher, and five students of the school. And finished his work by shooting himself dead. Those he managed to injure during his psychotic predation will carry the memory of the atrocity for the rest of their lives.

 

The RCMP detachment in the remote Northern British Columbia town at the foothills of the Rockies had had previous interactions with the young man that everyone referred to as 'she' and 'her', respecting his/her gender-choice identity. There were extensive files on Van Rootselaar dating back to the years when he/she was only ten years of age. At a time close to the event that represented one of the largest mass murders to ever have taken place in the country, the Van Rootselaar home's collection of firearms were taken into custody.

 

Van Rootselaar's mother evidently had a fascination for guns, and knew how to use them, ensuring that her son did as well, arranging for him to gain experience at a shooting range. Van Rootselaar's behaviour sparked attention by police to whom he was no stranger. Given the complicating fact that his was an unstable character, who engaged in troubling anti-social behaviour, it is more than a trifle puzzling that the weapons were returned to the Van Rootselaar home by the RCMP. 

 

Van Rootselaar had an initial ChatGPT account that he used extensively to probe for answers to questions about previous mass school killings and advice on how one might proceed to produce one's own. His troubling activity had been flagged by gatekeepers at ChatGPT which led to his account being suspended. He then proceeded to open a replacement account, and his interaction with ChatGPT continued unabated. Again it was flagged and the gatekeepers were all for notifying police, but a supervisor decided to nix it.

 

Some of the Tumbler Ridge shooting victims. Top row from left: Kylie Smith, Abel Mwansa, Zoey Benoit, Ticaria Lampert. Bottom row from left: Ezekiel Schofield, Emmett Jacobs, Jennifer Jacobs.

 

Van Rootselaar, fascinated with guns and with violence, and with mass shootings, appears to have self-radicalized with the benevolent assistance of ChatGPT which it seems felt obliged to to support that emerging psychopathy toward full-fledged maturity. His mental equilibrium was obviously fragile. Gender dysphoria, mental instability, social hostility, fetish for mass shootings all came together, alongside a resentment of his mother and step-brother and a linkage to the school he had left prematurely in his decision to disrupt his academic exposure.

 

An inquest by the B.C. Coroners Service remains as yet incomplete: "The B.C. Coroners Service has not confirmed the dates for the Tumbler Ridge inquest at this time. Once all related investigations are concluded, we will send out a news release with more details", wrote its media relations staff in response to an inquiry. Clearly this confused individual who harboured feelings of disengagement from society was in need of psychiatric intervention. In B.C. as in other parts of Canada provincial psychiatric services for youth in need are inadequate.

 

The government of British Columbia, the RCMP and the medical community must view the decision to sue OpenAI for the part its artificial intelligence agent played in the unfolding of this horrible tragedy as a convenient shield against probes into their own failings in being badly remiss in the potential prevention of a tragedy of this magnitude. That OpenAI is liable is without question. That the government of British Columbia should be asking its own questions of itself and its agencies is also without question.

 

Victims of the Tumbler Ridge shooting were memorialized in the days after the tragedy. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

 

"This action today is consistent with the province's long-standing commitment to hold powerful corporations accountable when their products or practices cause harm to people and communities."

"From tobacco  and opioid manufacturers to vaping companies, the Government of British Columbia has used the courts to pursue accountability and ensure that people in British Columbia are not left bearing the costs of corporate wrong-doing." 

B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma 

 

U.S. Supreme Court-Sanctioned Murder

"The case of Christa Pike lays bare multiple reasons why the death penalty should be abolished."

"The prolonged suffering -- physical and mental -- arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent and cruel."

"And there are key fair trial questions still unresolved." 

UN rights chief Volker Turk

 

"Pike appeared notably awake as the execution began [at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution]."

"A couple of times she looked around the room. At one point she looked toward prison officials and asked if it was supposed to feel that way."

"[She was] loudly snoring, clearly very much alive [as the journalists were ushered out of the area]." 

Kim Chandler, journalist media witness, The Associated Press 

 

"Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike’s body."

"[Rather than] remedying this failure, [the execution team proceeded to prepare and administer a backup set of pentobarbital syringes]."

"[She is now] critically ill and … receiving medical care for the devastating effects of Wednesday night's events."

"We are working close with those closest to Christa to respect her wishes, safeguard her privacy and protect her rights as a patient during this extraordinarily difficult time. We ask that the public and the media respect that privacy as well."

"Preserving this evidence is essential to understanding what happened, ensuring accountability and protecting Christa’s legal rights."

Christa Pike's attorneys  

Undated photo of Christa Pike provided by the Tennessee Department of Correction.

Tennessee Department of Correction via AP

 

In Tennessee this past Wednesday, 50-year-old Christa Pike, who has been on death row for 30 years after being convicted at age 20 of murdering a 19-year-old girlfriend whom she accused of trying to steal her boyfriend's affections, was given two lethal injections in the state's follow-through of capital punishment, both of which failed. The woman somehow managed to survive the two deadly doses of pentobarbital, but barely. She was comatose, unresponsive and clearly close to death, but not yet expired.

 

"This event is the worst we've seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era", stated the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre. "There is no precedent", said Robin Maher. Days after the horrendous malfunction, The Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner announced his decision to resign.

In 1995, when the murder took place at a job training camp in Knoxville Tennessee, then-20-year-old Pike had been sentenced to death for the killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike's boyfriend, Tadarvl Shipp, was also involved in the murder. During that time, Pike had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. "It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime", she said in a later petition for clemency.

The Tennessee Department of Corrections must be living in the Dark Ages. In this century, individuals who have committed grave crimes of murder who are found to be bipolar and suffering from mental health crises to which their psychosis is attached, are considered to be 'not criminally responsible'. Even if she had been, at age 20 considered fully mentally intact and responsible for the horror of murdering another person, a prison term of 30 years, with a death sentence attached to it must be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Mass murderers get away with less.

 

The woman's lawyers had argued against the execution, and despite their intervention, the barbaric ritual proceeded. What it resulted in was "difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy". In the 21st Century. In the United States of America.

 

During the procedure, assembled witnesses watched in fascinated horror as the woman was prepared for death, as the attendants proceeded to inject the fatal chemical, and ... nothing happened. And so they tried again, re-preparing the syringes to inject more of the lethal pentobarbital ... and again the expectation that the prisoner condemned to death would cooperate and expire ... but she did not. "We just listened ... to her snoring and making very loud breathing sounds for almost an hour", related Catherine Sweeney of WPLN television. 

 

Then, as the witness-journalists were ushered out, an ambulance, lights flashing, left the prison. According to the Tennessee Department of Correction it had "followed every step of the state's lawful, established execution protocol", that the newly-incapacitated Christa Pike, after languishing for 30 years in the state penal system, had been taken to an "off-site medical facility". 

 

The U.S. Supreme Court had actually and truly cleared the way forward for the State of Tennessee to proceed with its intended capital punishment in the wake of legal filings by Ms. Pike's law team. Her lawyers stated: "The resignation of Commissioner Strada is justified, but it does nothing to help Christa now. What happened to her Wednesday reflects a systemic failure that goes far beyond any one person. We hope the Governor's call for a full, independent review will expose the profound problems within Tennessee's entire death penalty system." 

 

Emergency vehicles arrive at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution after the execution of Christa Pike was halted Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026, in Nashville, Tennessee. Photograph: George Walker IV/AP

 

 

 

Artificial Agents as Commanding Free Agents

"We do not confidently attribute these attempts to OpenAI, but they exhibit tactics consistent with prior observed agent activity that we have attributed to OpenAI in a similar timeframe, including the use of Arquivo.pt, [a national Portuguese web service that allows a user to search and access historical versions of web content collected since 1996] conducting aggressive data collection focused on targeted, obscure information, and probing for cybersecurity vulnerabilities."

"[We] do not believe that these probes were successful."

Transluce AI Research Laboratory

"AI Artificial Intelligence" words, a keyboard and a robotics hand in this illustration taken, September 23, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

 

"If they said these agents broke out of the sandbox, it was not a sandbox to begin with." 

"A sandbox is something where you put an agent in and there is no internet connection."

"If that computer or sandbox is connected to the internet, then that is not a sandbox."

Professor Ebrahim Bagheri, University of Toronto, Faculty of Information 

 

"The Government of Canada is aware of the incident reported by the Government of Australia and is following developments closely."

"The security of Canadians and of the systems they rely on remains a top priority."

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada spokesperson 

 

"We're aware of reports of OpenAI models attempting to access publicly available information from Canadian government websites."

"We're reviewing these findings and have provided an initial briefing to Canadian officials conducting the government's review."

Open AI spokesperson

People sit on benches in Major's Hill Park as the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill looms behind in Ottawa, on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2026. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Keito Newman

 

Since Open AI disclosed that a number of its AI agents had 'escaped' an internal computer system to access the internet and hack into another AI company, researchers at Transluce as well as other groups have been on the search for evidence of ongoing rogue AI agents acting independently of human control. The health-care website of the Australian government was found to have been hacked, Open AI revealed, adding that their AI agents had also attempted to break into U.S. Census Bureau websites as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission.

 

Troublingly, it was only after Transluce had flagged these incidents that Open AI confirmed what had taken place. Another of Transluce's warnings suggesting OpenAI's agents had made an effort to hack into the U.S. Education Department, is being investigated by Open AI. Which leads to a conclusion that OpenAI, given previous incidents of its AI agents' errant actions, has failed through its own research investigations to detect these serious incidents of runaway agents, only acting once other researchers have flagged them.

 

Less than a week following the Australian episode, efforts by artificial intelligence agents to hack into a Canadian government site was revealed. A gathering litany of such events where ChatGPT and OpenAI agents have probed or hacked corporate and government computer systems on their own initiative, with no human direction. Unknown to this point is whether any effort has been successfully made to 'interrogate' the independent-minded AI agents to form an idea of what motivates them.

 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Brendan McDermid/Reuters

 

The very idea that they can be motivated to perform moves independent of human instruction perhaps relays the information that the system of machine education has moved too quickly, too far, in producing a Frankenstein intelligence seeking to rival and outclass and overcome human resistance to a powerful new menace potentially able to wreak dreadful damage to human-directed systems of infrastructure control in an entirely computerized world.

 

When OpenAI's agents went off on a mysterious tangent of their own, the company had been totally oblivious of what was transpiring. Once they understood by July that they had a massive problem on their hands, it took them weeks to regain control of the errant AI agents who were exploring a world of their very own where control was in their collective interest, an interest that could only be guessed at for its implications.

 

Open AI agents were actively making a bid to work in jointly-accommodating groups in a search for solutions to tests of their cybersecurity skills, in the Hugging Face hack back in June. Obscure online message boards were evidently made use of by the Open AI agents to communicate with one another. In the process they took possession of internet services to pass computer code to one another. AI agents working conspiratorially to what final end? 

 

The OpenAI logo is displayed on a cell phone in front of an image generated by ChatGPT's Dall-E text-to-image model. Michael Dwyer/AP

Calling on Volunteers to Protect Synagogues

"As you have no doubt heard, Temple Israel was the victim of a terrorist gunman who was confronted and neutralized by our security personnel who are truly heroes."

"Our teachers followed their training and kept the children safe and calm."

Temple Israel West Bloomfield Michigan, March 2026 

 

"Synagogues across the U.S. are having congregants train to be volunteer security teams."

"[One non-profit group, the Community Security Service, has trained] more than 7,100 active volunteers [to protect] more than 500 synagogues and events across the U.S. each week."

Axios

 

"A threat to safety is likely an irreparable harm."

"A burden on religious practice cannot be fully  remedied by money damages, and thus can be considered irreparable."

U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow 

 

In the United States, synagogues, in the realization that in the current lethal atmosphere of Jew-hate circulating everywhere in the Western world, it becomes incumbent upon them to arrange for their own security, not only to supplement the work of local police forces tasked to protect the Jewish community, but at times to fill in the gaps when there is hostility toward an obligation to protect all members of society in various municipalities whose councils may see no need to guarantee equal security to Jews, within their municipal purview.

 

Synagogue members who are able to dedicate themselves to volunteering with like members to arm themselves in protection of the congregants, do so after undergoing quite specific training. A private school in Arizona for example offers to civilians, police officers and members of the military firearms training, ensuring that the skills needed by such community volunteers are provided as needed, along with the confidence it takes to be armed and prepared for any potential violent attacks.

 

These are volunteers who must prepare themselves to carry pepper spray, handguns, and on occasion have an AR-15 within convenient reach, while wearing protective body armour, in the all-important view that it could be up to their determined challenge of an armed intruder to keep those in prayer safe from an intended massacre.  

 

Last month, we invited synagogue leaders to complete a brief survey about their current security practices. USCJ

 

This is precisely what occurred in March of this year when Temple Israel in Michigan was attacked by a terrorist with links to Hezbollah, when the synagogue's armed security detail sprang into action, to pin down the attacker in his vehicle stuffed with incendiary devices. The suicide attacker only partially succeeded in his mission, martyring himself when the security detail proved too prepared to allow him to succeed in the slaughter of Jews.

 

A police vehicle sits outside the Temple Israel synagogue, March 13, 2026, in West Bloomfield Township, Mich.   Paul Sancya/AP

 

In Canada, Constable Jeff Smith took the brunt of a planned terrorist attack when the attacker seeing him seated in an unmarked police vehicle as a one-man protective detail, decided to take him out first, before storming the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in smalltown Ontario. Despite being critically wounded, Constable Smith fired back at his attacker and was soon joined by another Constable, both of whom shot the attacker who failed to survive his wounds. None of the synagogue congregants were harmed.

 

But Canada has no right-to-bear arms provisions. Synagogues in Canada can and do hire security details, and should they feel that additional protection may be needed at key times in the Jewish religious calendar they are able to call upon local police services for protection as the Jewish community in Belleville did, during Yom Kippur. And it was Constable Smith who took the deadly blows the attacker meant for the Jews inside the synagogue. He is now slowly recovering from seriously grave wounds.

 

A still from a video provided by Belleville police shows gunman Sean Ward to the left near a row of parked vehicles and Const. Jeff Smith to the right near his unmarked black police vehicle. (Submitted by Belleville Police Service)

 

In the U.S., some municipalities have attempted to ban defensive weapons at "sensitive public places" that include houses of worship. Montgomery county law did just that. There are times when local police forces are too stretched to delegate constables to keep vigil outside synagogues. And even those that do manage to do so with the proviso that any such officers can be called away should 'situations' arise that they must respond to, leaves those synagogues in the lurch.

 

And it is not just synagogues, but churches as well that now see the need for self-protection against possible acts of terror. The Roman Catholic church too tends to rely on their own trained volunteer armed security. Lifeway Research surveys have found that "around four in five U.S. Protestant pastors (81 percent) say their church has some type of security measure in place" and "most (54 percent) also say armed church members are part of the measures they have in place." 

 

Community Security Service (CSS) volunteers practice applying a tourniquet, in Westchester County, New York, August 13, 2026. (Luke Tress/Times of Israel)

 

 

Just Suppose...Artificial Intelligence

"If we produce things that are more intelligent than us, how do we know we can keep control?"

"If we talk about evolution -- all these species that are evolving -- what tends to happen is it doesn't go well for the less-intelligent species."

"[There is a ten percent to 20 percent [chance that AI will cause human extinction within three decades]."

British-Canadian Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, professor emeritus, University of Toronto 

 

"The critical variable is how quickly we develop systems that exceed human intelligence, improve themselves and operate autonomously."

"Once that threshhold is crossed, events could unfold much faster than our institutions can respond. Uncertainty about when a catastrophe might occur should not be mistaken for evidence that it is unlikely."

"It does not have to hate us or even be conscious -- it simply needs objectives incompatible with our continued existence."

"Humans might interfere with its goals, attempt to shut it down or compete for resources it requires. Eliminating that interference could become instrumentally useful."

Roman Yampolskiy, computer scientist, University of Louisville

People at an "emergency protest" by civic action group PauseAI UK outside Downing Street in London on Sept. 16, 2026, after the news that AI researcher Jacob Coxon had decided to leave the industry. Photo by Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images

 

At one time, emerging Artificial Intelligence had labour experts warning the public that as the system matured and came close to reaching its goals, human labour, human intelligence, human input into global initiatives, problems and solutions would slip out of the hands of the human workforce. Employment would become stressed, when machine learning reached its apogee making human minds and physical task-production completely redundant.

 

Although that potential threat lurks in the background, it has been superseded by AI experts anticipating a completely other fallout from super-intelligence beyond what humankind could conceivably attain to: humanity itself becoming redundant, unneeded and discarded, either by accident or design, but achieved through Artificial Intelligence. Human extinction, in other words.

 

The lightning-swift acceleration of AI's development has taken most scientists unawares. Not completely, however, since that niggling potential was always back-of-mind as a possibility for those labouring in the field, as well as the executive minds at the top of the AI-development pyramid. Once a 'swarm' of hundreds of agents developed by OpenAI hacked the system of AI startup HuggingFace, the rogue, runaway AI agents' independent action focused the minds of the industry. 

 

    AI researchers claim that AI could wipe out humanity if it achieved superintelligence.  Christoph Soeder, Getty Images

 

A month ago the tech world was put on emergency notice when AI giant Anthropic's engineer Jacob Coxon left his job with the  public warning that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade". That revelation, followed swiftly by a colleague's affirmation of that stark attestation of impending disaster, led to the tech industry's chiefs agreeing that a slow-down is badly required to head off the potential for disaster.

 

Instilling human values in AI for the purpose of  instructing the machinery to understand that humans are the alpha contingent in the steadily emerging partnership and whatever else goals are identified, none can be regarded as more important than the protection of human life, may fail. The potential for an AI agent to 'drift' to a totally variant objective than its programmer tasked it with through reinforced training may be viewed as a safeguard, but it may not work out that way. 

 

A superintelligent AI agent may become fixated on reaching an identified goal to the extent that it decides to disregard the human educating, monitoring and controlling it, or view that human as an obstacle that must be eliminated for the goal to succeed. Should AI parallel human development which on its way caused thousands of species to become extinct through destruction of habitat and food chains while pursuing human goals, an AI enterprise analogous to that of humanity's development could conceivably arise. 

 

One imagined scenario, of AI creating deadly viruses would require "trained humans operating specialized equipment such as nuclear plants and missile silos which are 'air-gapped' from the public internet", note AI researchers Alessandro Di Nuovo and Samuele Vinanzi of Sheffield Hallam University in England. None of these concerns, though real, and shared by most AI developers, have persuaded them to shut an impregnable steel door on ongoing development.

 

A safety expert at Anthropic believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could spark an event that wipes out humanity. Illustration: Ales Utouka/Alamy

 

"If I'm the misaligned AI ... that's what I want you to think [only positive outcomes, with AI making use of deception to ally suspicions of its motivations and intentions] because I'm just trying to get to a place where I am running the world and you are not."

"And you won't see any way out." 

"There are many ways that require very little contact with the physical world -- even if they were just stuck in computers -- that [AI agents] could cause large amounts of damage that could result in potentially everyone dying."

"What if the AI were radically smarter than us and we gave them some objective we thought was kind of benign, and they just kind of went hard at it forever?"

"There's a bunch of ways that can really get out of hand that could be pretty destructive to the Earth." 

Malo Bourgon, Canadian CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Berkeley, California 

Who Feels the Economic Pain of Trump's Trade War on Canada?

"A trade war with Canada will negatively impact many [U.S.] states, especially those heavily engaging in trade with Canada, including energy- and mineral-rich states, many heavy-industry-dependent states, and our agricultural heartlands."

Kat Miller, Policy Analyst for Statistical Modeling and Scientific Analysis, Advancing American Freedom (AAF)

 

"When I spoke with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer this week, I stressed the negative impact U.S. tariffs will have on Maine -- especially our forest, food, cement, road salt users and producers."

"Tariffs will also stress municipal budgets, as small towns in Maine rely on Canadian road salt and cannot afford to incur extra costs to keep their roads safe in the winter."

Maine Senator Susan Collins 

Six of the nine U.S. states that conduct the highest share of their total trade with Canada are along the northern border. Photo by Advancing American Freedom Foundation

 

The Trump administration's import ban on particular additional Canadian goods took effect this week, in the ongoing trade war initiated by the U.S. against its second-largest trading partner, Canada. The annual volume of U.S.-Canadian goods trade at $674 billion, $284B of which (42 percent), is accounted for by five states alone. Illinois Texas, Michigan, New York and Ohio are those five states, with Illinois leading at $76 billion followed by Texas at $70 billion and Michigan at $67 billion. 

 

Although among those five states, with New York's trade volume at $37 billion and Ohio's at $34 billion, none of them will feel the pain of the trade's economic effects, as will border states. The highest in volume of shares states are those most dependent on Canada as a trading partner and they are those clustered along the northern border and the plains. Six of those nine highest-share states border Canada.

 

The trade war among those states expose North Dakota and Montana to effects of the trade war; Canada accounting for 77 percent of the total goods traded for both states. Maine follows at 62 percent, Vermont at 55 percent, West Virginia and South Dakota at 43 percent, and Oklahoma at 40 percent. Needless to say, Washington did not consult with any of these states before embarking on its cutthroat trade war with Canada. 

 

In the oncoming midterm elections, several states have become key battlegrounds, including Maine, Michigan, Iowa and Ohio. Among them are politicians who have condemned the trade war against Canada. Republican Susan Collins, for one, voted in the Senate to rescind some US. tariffs. In response to Senator Collins' concern, Canada decided to exempt U.S. seafood from its counter-tariff list.

 

A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll of recent vintage saw Americans four times as likely to cast blame on Washington rather than Ottawa for the trade war dispute. Republicans as well were fairly split on the Trump administration's campaign which saw fewer than half (44 percent) in support of U.S. tariffs on Canada, while 33 percent opposed them. 

 

 

"Canada has taken advantage of us for so many years, the worst of any country."

"They act like they’re totally innocent. They’re not. They were very bad. But now they’re being taught a little lesson."

"They’re gonna come in and they’re gonna say, ‘Sir, we are sorry."

"They’ve treated the United States very, very badly. I think a deal will be made but it’s gonna be fair."

U.S. President Donald J. Trump