Can We Stop The Machines From Killing Us All?
I was never a big fan of television. When my kids were younger we didn't have it at all, instead we had a folder filled with CDs of our favourite films and every Monday we'd go to Blockbuster and rent 5 movies for $5.
Now one of my greatest joys is being alive for the golden age of television. Breaking Bad broke open a whole new world with longer more complicated and surprising stories, characters I fell in and out of love with and twists and turns in every direction.
But this year something else is happening and it's kind of blowing my mind. In just the last few weeks I have seen two shows about communities living underground as the world ends (Silo and Paradise) and one about a rogue AI that's trying to take over the world (Next).
There was something one of the characters said in one of the shows, (I'm trying not to give spoilers) I don't know the exact words but they were eerily similar to something I wrote in The Gospel Of A Mad Woman,
"In December 2024, Google's willow's quantum chip solved a problem in under five minutes that would have taken the world's fastest supercomputer ten septillion years.
That's ten million billion years",
The screenwriters aren't writing science fiction, they are writing science fact.
And now even the scientists are writing.
"As great as the long-term promise of AI may be, the majority of our focus should be on the next few years. We are facing a transition to a world with incredibly intelligent machines, and we need to ensure that transition works out well for humanity. We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human, in a world where most tasks could be performed by AI. To prevent extreme concentration of power in a world where undertakings that would have taken thousands of experts now will be achievable by a few people operating a large computer. And to ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own". Jakub Pachocki, Chief Scientist at OpenAI
The answer is really really simple.
It's the same answer I've been banging on about like Cassandra for years.
Patriarchy and war are recent constructs in human history and not the natural order. The idea that man is innately violent is simply not true.
Man The Hunter:
The idea that men evolved to hunt whilst women gathered is blown to bits with multiple lines of evidence.
Skeletal bone testing proves that Neanderthal females and males show no differences in trauma patterns or repetitive-stress pathologies. We all went hunting large game.
This was backed up In 2023 by Abigail Anderson of Seattle Pacific University and Cara Wall-Scheffler who studied 63 foraging societies and found that 79% have women hunters who still hunt whilst pregnant and breastfeeding.
Analysis of bone marks at early Homo erectus sites suggests early humans were scavengers, not hunters. The meat supply was too unreliable to sustain them, meaning foraging by women and grandmothers was the primary driver of evolutionary changes like longer lifespan.
Survival of the fittest:
Darwin did not write this, that credit goes to Herbert Spencer, a civil engineer and editor of the Economist. He coined the term in 1864, six years after the publication of 'On The Origin Of Species'.
Darwin did include the phrase in the 5th edition of his book even though he'd pointed out that there were exceptions to natural selection.
But Spencer wasn't a scientist. He applied Darwin's evolutionary principles to human society believing that competition between individuals and groups leads to the improvement of society This view was used to justify laissez-faire capitalism, minimal government intervention and opposition to welfare programs.
Ironically, he's buried in HIghgate cemetery directly opposite his exact opposite — Karl Marx.
The Great Man Theory
In 1841 Thomas Carlyle claimed "the history of the world is but the biography of great men". He believed heroes shape history through their vision and leadership.
He was not alone in his assumptions, ancient historians like Herodotus, Thucydides and Livy were obsessed by kings, warlords, and empires.
This patriarchal romantic claptrap persisted into the mid-20th century when the world's educational establishments finally opened themselves up to more than just wealthy men. It did not take long to change the narrative toward the reality of collective action creating change rather than lone heroes.
And now the 'Great Men' on the forefront of AI technology are shaking in their boots, asking everyone to slow down because there's a chance the machines could kill us all.
Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, said this week that building superintelligence is like "summoning an alien species" — and that thinking about it as "an alien mind we don't fully understand is pretty terrifying",
It's not that scary while we're still in control. And the answer is really simple.
Before the machine starts thinking for itself it learns from what humans have recorded since the start of time and it's a pretty gruesome tale.
However, the discoveries from ancient Mesopotamia, uncovered in the 20th century and still being translated today, show the cradle of western civilisation as a place where we went from tribes that hunted together to magnificent cities where we created and traded with our neighbours.
Then in around 3,000 BCE the cities built high walls, local skirmishes turned into mass warfare, domination replaced cooperation. Empire replaced friendly trade.
In 1750BCE the king of the first successful empire wrote laws that made women and children the property of men, established a caste system and changed the the judicial system from one of responsibility to one of retribution. An "Eye for an Eye" does not come from the Bible. It was beamed down to Hammurabi by the sun god Samash.
These laws have been retold and rehashed by men for centuries and used by every 'Great Man' as a rationale for power. And it's all complete bollocks.
The machines have been trained (and old books pulped) on this corrupted data. I'm not a technical person, but I'm pretty sure it's possible to downgrade knowledge pre- 1900 CE where the majority of mankind's opinions are often scientifically or socially unsound because they only include a fraction of the ideas, work and experience of humanity.
If the machines upweigh modern thought, modern discoveries and the possibilities these advancements unveil, we won't be repeating past mistakes.
Nowhere is this more evident than the 7th Tribe's Machine Teaching Initiative where we ask exactly that with the simple prompt, "What was humanity's biggest mistake?". Every single LLM has cited agriculture, climate change, nuclear weapons and not a single woman.
When prompted to include the work of female academics and thought leaders the answer changes entirely. The biggest mistake humanity ever made was domination over other humans and the earth.
For 3,777 years men have propagated the myth of male supremacy, race supremacy, and class supremacy. These stories dominate the training data.
No wonder the AI wants to kill us all.
Pure logic tells us that a species that hasn't evolved past Bronze Age ideas is not the fittest. So yes, our survival is at stake.
But what if we looked at the ideas of the man buried opposite the man who created that myth? Marx would probably see this moment as another ruling-class ideology trying to present itself as natural law.
He'd want to know who owns the machine, whose data trains it, and in whose interests does it operate? We all should. It's up to every one of us to ensure the transition works for humanity rather than for a new priesthood of tech barons—by preserving human agency, preventing extreme concentration of power, and making collective, scientifically grounded, non-patriarchal knowledge the basis of the future.
Otherwise the AI will be programmed to dominate and it will.
Please take part and share our Machine Teaching Initiative. It only takes five minutes and gives us the receipts we require to show how dangerous the bias is.
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