AINOW: AI Is Leading the World Into a New, Permanent Cold War

However, there was another very prophetic work created by Orwell—an essay published a few years earlier, in 1945. “You and the Atomic Bomb” offers an amazingly accurate prediction of what the creation of a superweapon, the atomic bomb, would cause globally. The result of this, as Orwell prophesied, would be a “long peace” without large-scale wars. And the price of establishing this “peace that will not be a world” will be a “permanent cold war between the US and the Russians,” who “do not yet have the secret of making an atomic bomb, but everything indicates that they will receive it within a few years.”

And so it all happened. But even more striking is the following. In the essay “You and the Atomic Bomb,” Orwell succinctly and accurately described the mechanism of the course of world history’s dependence on the progress of technology.

• World history is the history of weapons.
• Increasingly powerful weapons are the result of technological advances.
• New weapons can be “simple,” that is, relatively cheap and available for production by any country (bows, guns, machine guns, grenades, etc.) or “complex” — expensive and only available for production by “superpowers” (like tanks, battleships, and bombers).
• “Complex” weapons are “tyrannical” in nature; they make the strong stronger. And the “simple” is “democratic” by its nature, “until they find justice for it, gives its claws to the weak.”
• Nuclear weapons are “super complex” and, therefore, “super tyrannical.”
• The atomic bomb can finally complete the process of depriving the exploited classes and peoples of the ability to revolt and, at the same time, lay the foundation for military equality among the owners of the bombs.
• Owners of nuclear weapons: “Since it is impossible to defeat each other, they are likely to continue to rule the world separately.” And as a result of this, “the world will not come to general self-destruction but to an era of the same terrifying stability as the slave-owning eras of antiquity” adjusted for the increase in prosperity due to progress.

Because this prediction, which came true in the 20th century, will be exactly repeated in the 21st century with the advent of a new “superweapon” that is “super complex” and “super tyrannical.” This is the generative AI of large models.

The authors of the report “Predictability and Surprise in Large Generative Models” warned in February that most decisions determining the future of these super-powerful technologies will be made by increasingly tiny groups of capital-intensive private sector actors in the two countries.

The new large and serious AINOW report “Landscape 2023: Confrontation of Technical Power” describes the same. Only a handful of companies with incredibly huge resources can build large-scale AI models.”

As Orwell wrote: “If the atomic bomb were something cheap and easily produced, like a bicycle or an alarm clock, perhaps the world would once again plunge into barbarism, but on the other hand, it could lead to the end of national sovereignty and the establishment of a highly centralized police state.” This is 100% applicable to AI as well.

Read more about AI: