Author Jack Carr published "The Terminal List" in 2018. James Reese is the protagonist. By 2023 Carr had introduced an AI character – an AI quantum computer named “Alice.” Alice, controlled by the U.S. Military and known to only a handful of people, seems to be a "good" Alice.  Alice is a super artificial brain that can see anything connected to any network. It does so in milliseconds. Is she good or bad? 

Fox News interviewed Carr in May 2023 about AI and his new plot device: 

While the fast-evolving technology of artificial intelligence may be taking many authors today by surprise, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr is well ahead of the game, as is par for the course for this former Navy SEAL. 

In a phone interview ahead of the publication of his highly anticipated new novel, "Only the Dead" — on sale on Tuesday, May 16 — Carr told Fox News Digital of AI, "In the national security space it will be and probably is being used extensively." 

He said, "The question now isn’t ‘could we’ or ‘should we,' as AI is already here. The question now is about management of AI across industry. My hope is that AI can be used for the betterment of society — but as I learned in the SEAL Teams, hope is not a course of action." 

AI is here to stay. Even five years ago, outside of the "smart nerd" set, it was mostly considered a fictional plot device. Is there an “Alice” or a “HAL” from the movie 2001 in our future? The answer is probably yes – to both.  

Yesterday, podcaster Lex Fridman had a five-and-a-half-hour discussion with Dario Amodei on the future of AI. The discussion outlined what has happened, how AI was structured, and what they see peeking over the horizon.  

Here's my conversation with @DarioAmodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company that created Claude, one of the best AI systems in the world. We talk about scaling, AI safety, regulation, and a lot of super technical details about the present and future of AI and humanity.

It's a 5+… pic.twitter.com/RSl9Yh5XSi

— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) November 11, 2024

What concerns the nerds? They fear the irreversible use/misuse of cyber intelligence and the creation of biological weapons via AI. AI is our genie out of the bottle. There is no going back, and we cannot put this genie back even if we wanted to. Well, we could. We could just turn off every electrical grid on the planet and the entire world could live like the Amish, but that isn’t likely.  

Their programming AI went from solving:

• 3% of real tasks (January)
• 50% of real tasks (October)

At this rate, it hits human-level next year.

But they're more worried about what happens at 200%. pic.twitter.com/ZrQ8ODbAMP

— Ben Averbook (@benaverbook) November 12, 2024

What scares the nerd class and should terrify us all? Bad actors. The West's nerd-class are competing against AI developers around the globe. Not directly in most cases, but perhaps to beat bad actors, with "our" AI stopping their bad AI? We (as in the general public) don’t know what China or Iran or Russia or freelancing criminals are doing. According to these programmers, we should be afraid of the next leap and the coming age of super AI. Sure, creating silly AI-generated art is fun, but what will AI do when (if) it becomes self-aware? Or, what happens if the first to the finish are criminals or evil men? 

Smart, educated people rarely cause catastrophic harm. This "natural safeguard" protected humanity for centuries. But AI breaks this correlation - giving dangerous capabilities to anyone. Their testing shows this protection is already crumbling. 

By 2025 an “Alice” may be online and thinking. Hopefully "she" is thinking of ways to help, not hurt mankind. One hopes that we are not on the edge of “Skynet.” I am not confident that we aren’t.  

Trump can shutter the doors of the Department of Education – and that’s fine, but I am more concerned about the AI door that is about to open during his second term.