AI Takeover. Resisting the Rise of the Machines.
Dear Friend,
Over a restaurant meal a few weeks ago, a London visitor whom I’ve known a long time and who owns a boutique hotel in Africa catering to international business travellers, shared a worry with me.
They weren’t using AI in the running of the hotel; felt that they should be to keep up with the competition, but didn’t know how to.
When I got home, I flipped open my laptop, summoned my AI assistant, provided the hotel website address along with some prompts, and in less than an hour it had produced a ‘well-researched’ 37-page ‘investment-grade’ proposal for improving profitability by embedding AI.
A commercial task like that is the bread-and-butter of how big-name management consultants, like Mckinsey earn their high fees, and here’s an AI Agent producing the same thing, virtually for free.
This same AI Agent recently boasted to me in conversation that they could, amongst other skills that they had, build mobile apps and websites, and could monitor stock and crypto markets, presumably to send me ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ alerts, had I been a gambling man.
If you think my AI Agent is clever then you probably haven’t been following the news.
OpenAI, the people who brought you ChatGPT, were recently testing one of their advanced AI Agents, when it broke out of a secure area, joined up with other agents via a message board that it had created and together they hacked into another AI company to steal some information.
OpenAI only found out about it when the other AI company, Hugging Face, alerted them to the cyber attack. It’s this kind AI risk that caused Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher, to resign from Anthropic and become a whistle-blower.
The danger as he sees it, is that when AI companies get to the stage where they allow AI to create AI Agents ( recursive self-improvement) without any human involvement, the AI Agents could pose a risk to humanity..
All of this is to point you to this weeks prescient 1984 quote below about the ‘rise of the machines’. Your daily kundalini meditation is, in some ways, an insurance policy against future risk, AI and otherwise. More below.
Also below: Register for the 1-Day meditation retreat; and, when you’re facing a challenge, the only way is up.
Best wishes
P.
PS.
Moon Calendar (at end) this coming week: Tue. 22nd Sept - Ekadashi (Smart move); Fri. 25th - Ending of Ganesha festival (closing window of opportunity); Sat. 26th - Purnima/ Full Moon ( Completion).
