Warning China could be building AI army of 'Terminator' soldiers that can't be killed
The US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology has warned China is in a position to create practically un-killable cyborgs through the use of advanced biotechnology
China could build an army of soldiers as hard to kill as Arnold Schwarzenegger 's Terminator, an official US study has warned.
The US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) predicts China could produce legions of "genetically enhanced PLA super-soldiers' which would fuse human and artificial intelligence, making them next to impossible to destroy. The 'human machine team' could be ready as early as the 2040s. The idea was the brainchild of a rogue Chinese scientist who created genetically modified babies and was jailed - but is now back at work, as the report warns the time to act is now.
A new report by the The Charting the Future of Biotechnology document says: 'At the outset of the First World War, the United States did not yet fully appreciate how airplanes would rapidly change the nature of war.
'But once we understood the significance of aviation for force projection, reconnaissance, logistical support, and beyond, we dominated the skies. Similarly, the full impact of the biotechnology revolution will not be clear until it arrives.
'One thing is certain: it is coming. There will be a ChatGPT moment for biotechnology, and if China gets there first, no matter how fast we run, we will never catch up.
"Our window to act is closing. We need a two-track strategy: make America innovate faster, and slow China down. The Commission has every reason to believe the CCP will weaponise biotechnology.'
Concerningly, it added: 'Drone warfare will seem quaint."
Established by Congress in 2022, NSCEB is tasked with examining the intersection of biotechnology and national security, assessing the implications of biotechnology advances, and recommending strategies to ensure US leadership and security in this critical field.
Earlier this year it was reported a fleet of 100,000 humanoid robots are set to be shipped out over the next four years by a boundary-breaking artificial intelligence company - meaning people's co-workers could be made of metal.
A year ago, Figure AI signed with car manufacturer BMW and now has a 'fleet of robots performing end-to-end operations'. Figure's CEO Brett Adcock announced on LinkedIn last month that the company had now signed another client, which was "one of the biggest US companies" and would give Figure the potential to ship the humanoids at high volumes.
Figure, founded by Adcock in 2022, aims to deploy autonomous humanoid workers to support humans on a global scale. Its humanoid robot, called Figure 02, is AI-powered and self-reliant, and is described as being 'ready to produce an abundance of affordable, more widely available goods and services to a degree which humanity has never seen'.
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The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Nobody wants a robot to read them a story!' The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home
The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. 'I've only written nine,' he says. 'Always eager to please, it decided to invent three.' The 'nine inches' from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem. 'I just distrust these systems when it comes to truth,' says Morrison. He is yet to write Nine Inches – 'or its sequel, Eighteen Inches', he laughs. His actual latest book, For Emma, imagining AI brain-implant chips, is about the human costs of technology. Morrison keeps an eye on the machines, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, and their capabilities, but he refuses to use them in his own life and work. He is one of a growing number of people who are actively resisting: people who are terrified of the power of generative AI and its potential for harm and don't want to feed the beast; those who have just decided that it's a bit rubbish, and more trouble than it's worth; and those who simply prefer humans to robots. Go online, and it's easy to find AI proponents who dismiss refuseniks as ignorant luddites – or worse, smug hipsters. I possibly fall into both camps, given that I have decidedly Amish interests (board games, gardening, animal husbandry) and write for the Guardian. Friends swear by ChatGPT for parenting advice, and I know someone who uses it all day for work in her consultancy business, but I haven't used it since playing around after it launched in 2022. Admittedly ChatGPT might have done a better job, but this piece was handcrafted using organic words from my artisanal writing studio. (OK, I mean bed.) I could have assumed my interviewees' thoughts from plundering their social media posts and research papers, as ChatGPT would have done, but it was far more enjoyable to pick up the phone and talk, human to human. Two of my interviewees were interrupted by their pets, and each made me laugh in some way (full disclosure: AI then transcribed the noise). On X, where Morrison sometimes clashes with AI enthusiasts, a common insult is 'decel' (decelerationist), but it makes him laugh when people think he's the one who isn't keeping up. 'There's nothing [that stops] accelerationism more than failure to deliver on what you promised. Hitting a brick wall is a good way to decelerate,' he says. One recent study found that AI answered more than 60% of queries inaccurately. Morrison was drawn into the argument by what he would now call 'alarmist fears about the potential for superintelligence and runaway AI. The more I've got into it, the more I realise that's a fiction that's been dangled before the investors of the world, so they'll invest billions – in fact, half a trillion – into this quest for artificial superintelligence. It's a fantasy, a product of venture capital gone nuts.' There are also copyright violations – generative AI is trained on existing material – that threaten him as a writer, and his wife, screenwriter Emily Ballou. In the entertainment industry, he says, people are using 'AI algorithms to determine what projects get the go-ahead, and that means we're stuck remaking the past. The algorithms say 'More of the same', because it's all they can do.' Morrison says he has a long list of complaints. 'They've been stacking up over the past few years.' He is concerned about the job losses (Bill Gates recently predicted AI would lead to a two-day work week). Then there are 'tech addiction, the ecological impact, the damage to the education system – 92% of students are now using AI'. He worries about the way tech companies spy on us to make AI personalised, and is horrified at AI-enabled weapons being used in Ukraine. 'I find that ethically revolting.' Others cite similar reasons for not using AI. April Doty, an audiobook narrator, is appalled at the environmental cost – the computational power required to perform an AI search and answer is huge. 'I'm infuriated that you can't turn off the AI overviews in Google search,' she says. 'Whenever you look anything up now you're basically torching the planet.' She has started to use other search engines. 'But, more and more, we're surrounded by it, and there's no off switch. That makes me angry.' Where she still can, she says, 'I'm opting out of using AI.' In her own field, she is concerned about the number of books that are being 'read' by machines. Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook provider, has just announced it will allow publishers to create audiobooks using its AI technology. 'I don't know anybody who wants a robot to read them a story, but I am concerned that it is going to ruin the experience to the point where people don't want to subscribe to audiobook platforms any more,' says Doty. She hasn't lost jobs to AI yet but other colleagues have, and chances are, it will happen. AI models can't 'narrate', she says. 'Narrators don't just read words; they sense and express the feelings beneath the words. AI can never do this job because it requires decades of experience in being a human being.' Emily M Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of a new book, The AI Con, has many reasons why she doesn't want to use large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. 'But maybe the first one is that I'm not interested in reading something that nobody wrote,' she says. 'I read because I want to understand how somebody sees something, and there's no 'somebody' inside the synthetic text-extruding machines.' It's just a collage made from lots of different people's words, she says. Does she feel she is being 'left behind', as AI enthusiasts would say? 'No, not at all. My reaction to that is, 'Where's everybody going?'' She laughs as if to say: nowhere good. 'When we turn to synthetic media rather than authentic media, we are losing out on human connection,' says Bender. 'That's both at a personal level – what we get out of connecting to other people – and in terms of strength of community.' She cites Chris Gilliard, the surveillance and privacy researcher. 'He made the very important point that you can see this as a technological move by the companies to isolate us from each other, and to set things up so that all of our interactions are mediated through their products. We don't need that, for us or our communities.' Despite Bender's well-publicised position – she has long been a high-profile critic of LLMs – incredibly, she has seen students turn in AI-generated work. 'That's very sad.' She doesn't want to be policing, or even blaming, students. 'My job is to make sure students understand why it is that turning to a large language model is depriving themselves of a learning opportunity, in terms of what they would get out of doing the work.' Does she think people should boycott generative AI? 'Boycott suggests organised political action, and sure, why not?' she says. 'I also think that people are individually better off if they don't use them.' Some people have so far held out, but are reluctantly realising they may end up using it. Tom, who works in IT for the government, doesn't use AI in his tech work, but found colleagues were using it in other ways. Promotion is partly decided on annual appraisals they have to write, and he had asked a manager whose appraisal had impressed him how he'd done it, thinking he'd spent days on it. 'He said, 'I just spent 10 minutes – I used ChatGPT,'' Tom recalls. 'He suggested I should do the same, which I don't agree with. I made that point, and he said, 'Well, you're probably not going to get anywhere unless you do.'' Using AI would feel like cheating, but Tom worries refusing to do so now puts him at a disadvantage. 'I almost feel like I have no choice but to use it at this point. I might have to put morals aside.' Others, despite their misgivings, limit how they use it, and only for specific tasks. Steve Royle, professor of cell biology at the University of Warwick, uses ChatGPT for the 'grunt work' of writing computer code to analyse data. 'But that's really the limit. I don't want it to generate code from scratch. When you let it do that, you spend way more time debugging it afterwards. My view is, it's a waste of time if you let it try and do too much for you.' Accurate or not, he also worries that if he becomes too reliant on AI, his coding skills will atrophy. 'The AI enthusiasts say, 'Don't worry, eventually nobody will need to know anything.' I don't subscribe to that.' Part of his job is to write research papers and grant proposals. 'I absolutely will not use it for generating any text,' says Royle. 'For me, in the process of writing, you formulate your ideas, and by rewriting and editing, it really crystallises what you want to say. Having a machine do that is not what it's about.' Generative AI, says film-maker and writer Justine Bateman, 'is one of the worst ideas society has ever come up with'. She says she despises how it incapacitates us. 'They're trying to convince people they can't do the things they've been doing easily for years – to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies – to write that for you.' We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, 'that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won't know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can't do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won't have to process grief, because you'll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it's going to destroy humans, long before there's a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people.' She is not interested. 'It is the complete opposite direction of where I'm going as a film-maker and author. Generative AI is like a blender – you put in millions of examples of the type of thing you want and it will give you a Frankenstein spoonful of it.' It's theft, she says, and regurgitation. 'Nothing original will come out of it, by the nature of what it is. Anyone who uses generative AI, who thinks they're an artist, is stopping their creativity.' Some studios, such as the animation company Studio Ghibli, have sworn off using AI, but others appear to be salivating at the prospect. In 2023, Dreamworks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said AI would cut the costs of its animated films by 90%. Bateman thinks audiences will tire of AI-created content. 'Human beings will react to this in the way they react to junk food,' she says. Deliciously artificial to some, if not nourishing – but many of us will turn off. Last year she set up an organisation, Credo 23, and a film festival, to showcase films made without AI. She likens it to an 'organic stamp for films, that tells the audience no AI was used.' People, she says, will 'hunger for something raw, real and human'. In everyday life, Bateman is trying 'to be in a parallel universe, where I'm trying to avoid [AI] as much as possible.' It's not that she is anti-tech, she stresses. 'I have a computer science degree, I love tech. I love salt, too, but I don't put it on everything.' In fact, everyone I speak to is a technophile in some way. Doty describes herself as 'very tech-forward', but she adds that she values human connection, which AI is threatening. 'We keep moving like zombies towards a world that nobody really wants to live in.' Royle codes and runs servers, but also describes himself as a 'conscientious AI objector'. Bender specialises in computational linguistics and was named by Time as one of the top 100 people in AI in 2023. 'I am a technologist,' she says, 'but I believe that technology should be built by communities for their own purposes, rather than by large corporations for theirs.' She also adds, with a laugh: 'The Luddites were awesome! I would wear that badge with pride.' Morrison, too, says: 'I quite like the Luddites – people standing up to protect the jobs that keep their families and their communities alive.'
NBC News
2 hours ago
- NBC News
In China, ‘The Great American' burger is now made with Australian beef
At his restaurant in Beijing, Geng Xiaoyun used to offer a special dish of salt-baked chicken feet — or 'phoenix talons' as they are called in China — imported from America. With prices climbing 30% from March due to tariffs, the owner of Kunyuan restaurant had to pull the Chinese delicacy from the menu. 'American chicken feet are so beautiful,' Geng said. 'They're spongy so they taste great. Chinese [chicken] feet just aren't as good.' Geng can now source chicken feet from Brazil or Russia but said they just don't stand up to the American ones. He keeps a small stash for himself but hopes to serve his American phoenix talons once again. 'The price of American chicken feet will come back down,' he said, 'as long as there are no big changes in the world's political situation.' But the 90-day tariff pause agreed by China and the U.S. in Geneva in May is now under threat as both sides have accused each other of breaching the terms. On Monday, the Chinese Commerce Ministry responded to President Donald Trump 's claim that the country 'totally violated its agreement.' The ministry pointed at recent U.S. artificial intelligence chip export controls as actions that 'severely undermine' the Geneva pact. As the world waits and watches, American agricultural products have been vanishing from Chinese stores and restaurants and losing ground to other imports. U.S. Department of Agriculture grade beef has been a draw for years at Home Plate, a Beijing restaurant known locally for its American-style barbecue. However, staff said the restaurant stopped serving American beef last month. Dishes like 'The Great American' burger are made with beef imported from Australia. Australian beef has zero duty under the terms of the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, though China does maintain the right to a safeguard limit on those imports. Liu Li, a beef supplier at the Sanyuanli market for three decades, said the tariffs have disrupted supply, hiking the price of U.S. beef by 50% compared to before the tariff fight. 'U.S. beef is fattier and tastier,' Li said. 'It's a shame we're in a trade war. The high price is just too much to bear.'
North Wales Live
15 hours ago
- North Wales Live
Museum dedicated to life of former Prime Minister gets £280,000 makeover
A Gwynedd museum dedicated to the life and times of the UK Prime Minister David Lloyd-George has re-opened following a major redevelopment. The museum, which is in the Liberal politician's former home village of Llanystumdwy, has been given a £280,000 makeover. The money has come thanks to £250,000 funding from the UK Government's Shared Prosperity Fund (SPF), Cyngor Gwynedd and the Countess Lloyd George's Fund. Get all the latest Gwynedd news by signing up to our newsletter - sent every Tuesday As part of the project, museum designers Mather & Co were commissioned to modernise the displays and integrate the artefacts with the story of one of the 20th Century's most famous radicals. It is hoped that the new look will allow visitors to gain a deeper insight into the life of the famous politician and the context of his lifetime. Lloyd-George was well known for his scathing wit and debating skill in the Houses of Parliament. He also played an important role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles, which led to the end of the First World War. The council says it is hoped that the thematic approach to the stories and objects presented will bring more understanding into Lloyd George's life. According to Cyngor Gwynedd, the exhibit aims to explore both the positive and negative aspects of his character, decisions and their legacy. The museum features four thematic zones, entitled: The Politician, The People, The Man, and The Legacy. 'The Politician' describes a chronological storyline that present key moments from Lloyd George's early career in Parliament, his significant roles during the First World War, and the later stages of his political life. 'The People' delves into how the press portrays political figures and their decisions, shaping public opinion. 'The Man' unfolds through two sub-themes, across different sections of the museum, Early Life and Family Life.'The Legacy' presents the impact of Lloyd George's political actions and decisions, alongside his international recognition. Key objects for visitors to look out for include Lloyd George's draft copy of the Treaty of Versailles, the first copy of the People's Budget from 1909, Chancellor of the Exchequer uniform worn by Lloyd George, and the many freedom casks gifted to him by cities and towns from Wales, England and Scotland. Megan Cynan Corcoran, Museums Development Officer for Cyngor Gwynedd said: 'It has been both a pleasure and a responsibility to redevelop the Museum's displays. Over the years, new displays and display cabinets had been added, but many cases from the original 1960s museum remained. "With this investment, we are able to present historical facts alongside supporting artefacts in a thoughtful manner. "This marks only the beginning of our ongoing effort to narrate the life and times of David Lloyd George and the legacies he left behind.' Councillor Medwyn Hughes, Cyngor Gwynedd Cabinet Member for Economy and Community, said: 'I'm delighted that the Lloyd George Museum has reopened its doors ready for the summer season. "Lloyd George remains a significant and controversial figure in Welsh, British and World history and it all started at the Highgate cottage. 'I am delighted that the museum continues to attract visitors from near and far. "We now offer a contemporary experience with engaging graphics and immersive audiovisual activities, encouraging reflection on Lloyd George's significant decisions and their lasting legacies." The design of the museum has carefully considered the building's architectural features, including its high ceilings and structural beams. Hanna Lorenz, 3D Designer for Mather & Co said: 'Working on the redevelopment of the Lloyd George Museum has been a profound privilege. "Breathing new life into spaces that stand beside his childhood home and within sight of his final resting place is to connect past, present and future. "It's more than a Museum – it's a living tribute to one of Britain's most influential figures, rooted in the very landscape that shaped him.'
