Author Archives: Garry Rodgers

About Garry Rodgers

After three decades as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police homicide detective and British Columbia coroner, International Best Selling author and blogger Garry Rodgers has an expertise in death and the craft of writing on it. Now retired, he wants to provoke your thoughts about death and help authors give life to their words.

THE TERRIBLE TRUTH ABOUT ADOLF HITLER’S REMAINS

The name “Adolf Hitler” is synonymous with evil. Pure evil. Hitler, or the Fuhrer as he self-titled, ruled Germany as chancellor and dictator from the rise of Nazism in 1933 until his death by suicide in 1945. During that time, millions of civilians and soldiers died and the Motherland was destroyed — a truly atrocious era in human history. Horrific as that time was, today there’s a terrible possibility a new monster could arise from Adolf Hitler’s remains.

From the moment Adolf Hitler expired, rumors circulated about what really happened to the Fuhrer’s body. Many witnesses were at Hitler’s death scene. Most saw his deceased form, and some admitted to help dispose of Hitler’s earthly evidence. Despite sworn statements and hard medical facts, few details were released to the Allies and the western world. That was because Russians did the investigation. Red Army Intelligence officers processed forensics that included autopsying and conclusively identifying Hitler’s cadaver.

Because of a lack of released information, speculation of Hitler’s survival soon started. Concocted conspiracy theories began, and there were sightings of the Fuhrer reported on every continent including a secret submarine base near Antarctica. Nazi hunters followed clues across Europe, in Asia, Africa, America and deep into Argentina. None paid off because the truth was the Russians had Hitler all along.

The truth is also that Hitler’s corpse made a remarkable journey from one hiding spot to another. He was buried and dug up at least five times over a twenty-five-year period. Today, tangible parts of Adolf Hitler still exist, and that leads to a modern biological possibility the Fuhrer could live again. Here’s the terrible truth about Adolf Hitler’s remains and how they could come back to haunt us.

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Adolf Hitler entered the world in 1889. His birthplace was near Linz which was then part of the Austrian-Hungarian alliance. Hitler moved to Germany in 1913 and worked as an aspiring architect but amounted to no more than a starving artist.

He served in the German Army during World War 1 and rose to a corporal rank. He was injured while running messages and spent most of the First World War on the sidelines. Following Germany’s surrender, Hitler immersed in trade union politics with the German Workers Party and soon got himself in trouble.

Hitler was jailed as a political prisoner after he led a failed coup. His lock-up during 1923 and 1924 gave him time to write Mein Kampf (My Struggle) which was his manifesto outlining his plan to gain dictatorial power in Germany and expand Aryan racial interests. Hitler also met Rudolf Hess who had significant influence in solidifying anti-Jewish hatred in Hitler’s psyche.

By the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler attained sufficient control through the National Socialist Party which were the Nazis. Hitler surrounded himself with particularly nasty men and used brute force to gain and maintain authority. Some were ideological psychopaths such as Heinrich Himmler. Others, like Herman Goering, were crass opportunists.

Hitler managed to establish massive support from the German population which included the Caucasians and excluded other races and cultures, especially the Jews. He formed plans to expand Germany’s empire and gain space for the blond-haired, blue-eyed pure Aryans. But his 1939 action of annexing Poland started the Second World War and began his undoing.

One of Hitler’s massive mistakes was declaring war on Russia. From a historical point, there was no need to do this for Hitler to execute his manifesto. It seems Hitler went slowly mad. His delusions caused him to fatally overextend his armed forces’ capacity, and the world turned on him through an unlikely Russian and western alliance.

By April of 1945, the war was nearly over, and Hitler denied it. He was probably insane by this time which is backed-up by accounts of his inner circle who stayed with Hitler in his Berlin bunker until the Russians arrived. There were reports of Hitler collapsing in tearful rages and hysterically ordering non-existent army units into combat action.

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler married his long-time mistress, Eva Braun, in the Fuhrer bunker. After a minor champagne celebration and dictating his last will and testament, Hitler and Braun retired to their chambers and committed joint suicide. Exactly how they did it and what became of their bodies turned into a world-class mystery. Some describe it as a parlor game full of crazy conspiracies.

The best evidence of what really happened to Hitler and Braun comes from two sources. One is eyewitnesses who were in the bunker at the time. The other is scientific material carefully collected by the Russian government. The first information pool has the usual witness fallibilities. The second source has credibility issues due to Russian misinformation, concealment, and cover-ups.

There is absolutely no doubt Adolf Hitler died on April 30, 1945. That is uncontested by any credible opinion. Most accounts have Hitler using the “pistol and poison” method where he ingested prussic acid, or hydrogen cyanide, while putting a handgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. All accounts indicate Evan Braun was not shot. Rather, she also took a cyanide dose.

Hitler clearly expressed his wish to have their bodies cremated. He’d learned of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s public execution where Mussolini’s body was hung by the feet and mutilated by the crowd. Adolf Hitler did not want that happening to him. He specifically instructed his staff to take his body out of the bunker and set in on fire in the garden.

This act is well recorded and supported by now-released evidence. Hitler’s aides poured some sort of petroleum fuel over the Fuhrer and Eva Braun. However, they were unable to create sufficient heat to consume the corpses and the cadavers were only charred.

There were several attempts to increase the inferno, but time ran out. The Russians were on their doorstep and lobbing artillery rounds into the garden and at the bunker. Aides hastily dug a shell crater into a shallow grave and covered up Hitler and Braun’s burnt bodies.

The bunker occupants surrendered and quickly disclosed where Hitler and Braun lay buried. Russian medical experts arrived on May 4, 1945 and exhumed the grave. They took both bodies to a facility at Buch in Berlin and stored them above ground. Two Russian pathologists performed autopsies on May 10, and their report was publicly released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 2000.

Hitler and Braun were superficially scorched to the point of visual non-recognition. However, they were skeletally intact which included their organs being suitable for dissection. Braun showed no bullet wound but did exhibit post-mortem shrapnel damage. One pathologist noted this probably happened as an artillery round exploded while she was on fire. Glass shards and cyanide traces were in her mouth, and they listed Eva Braun’s cause of death as suicide by poison.

Adolf Hitler showed no conclusive sign of disease or any sudden medical event. As rumors always said, Hitler only had one testicle. His brain was biologically unremarkable, but it was traversed by a bullet passage. The pathologists could not identify an entrance wound and theorized it was probably through the mouth. There was also no notable exit wound or bullet slug itself. The report says Hitler’s upper cranial bone was missing, and they assumed it was blown off by the gunshot force.

The pathologists conclusively found glass shards and cyanide traces in the Fuhrer’s mouth. They listed his cause of death as a combination of cyanide poisoning and a gunshot wound to the head. Something else they discovered in Hitler’s mouth was crucial to identifying his body. That was Adolf Hitler’s unmistakable dentition.

Hitler’s teeth were in terrible condition. His upper and lower mandibles were a mess of bridges and crowns with a sprinkling of natural enamel that enclosed tooth pulp. His gums were inflamed, and he had several extraction gaps that weren’t replaced. It was an odontologist’s dream when it came to making a postmortem identification.

The Russian pathology team located Hitler’s dentist and assistant who were thoroughly familiar with every part of the Fuhrer’s mouth. They viewed the dental work from the cadaver and produced Hitler’s complete records. They established there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever these dental works belong to the now-deceased Adolf Hitler.

Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator, wasn’t so sure. Stalin was paranoid that his nemesis Hitler would come to haunt him by people believing Hitler was alive and hidden or having his body become a future Nazi shrine. Stalin stalled and ordered Hitler’s body temporarily buried with the dental work brought to Moscow for his inspection.

It’s not clear from historical records where Hitler’s body was temporarily interred. It seems he was stored in the Russian-occupied sector of Berlin. Once Stalin was satisfied Hitler was dead, and the dental work was conclusive identification, he began a misinformation campaign to deny this. Stalin’s motives for fooling the west have gone to the grave with him, but Stalin wasn’t finished with Hitler’s body.

On June 3, 1945, Stalin ordered Hitler’s remains exhumed from temporary storage and moved to a highly secret and secluded spot. This was in the Brandenburg Forest area southwest of Berlin. Hitler, and presumably Braun as well, were buried in wooden caskets which were more like shipping crates. They lay undisturbed for several months until Stalin had a change of plans.

For whatever reason, Stalin ordered Hitler dug up again. On February 21, 1946, Stalin directed that Hitler be put under the ground at a parade square inside a Russian-held military base at Magdeburg, Germany. This spot was southwest of Brandenburg, but in a high-traffic area instead of a remote forest.

Joseph Stalin died in 1953. Russia carried on as the Soviet Union and entered the cold war. By 1970, Russia began turning occupied territory over to the East German government which was communist friendly. That included the Magdeburg base going back into German hands.

Yuri Andropov, who went on to be the Soviet Union leader, was the KGB head in the early 70s. Andropov knew Hitler’s body was under the Magdeburg parade square, and the last thing he wanted was a future German regime breathing life into Hitler’s memory by turning that site into a Neo-Nazi Mecca. Andropov had Hitler exhumed again and finally dealt with.

In the middle of the night on April 3-4, 1970, a secret shovel squad extracted what was left of Adolf Hitler’s bones and burned them. There are conflicting stories about what happened. Andropov is on public record stating the ashes were scattered in the nearby Elbe River. Work-party members state the bones were so dry that they vanished in smoke. And a few reports hint that Adolf Hitler was dumped into the city sewer system.

What finally took place with Hitler’s cadaver may never be known. However, there’s one thing for certain. Adolf Hitler’s teeth remain locked in a Kremlin vault. They’re resting there today.

What’s also certain is Hitler’s natural teeth contain his DNA. Those molecules stay preserved in the pulp. Hitler’s biological profile is encased within the enamel practically forever, and DNA can be cloned. Cloning Adolf Hitler was the plot in the 1978 blockbuster The Boys From Brazil. Back then, it was science fiction. Today, technology of DNA extraction and cloning zygote embryos into a surrogate mother is not sci-fi. It’s very, very, very real.

All it would take is some evil crackpot doctor like Joseph Mengele to steal Hitler’s tooth, saw it open, and start cloning away. That’s the terrible truth about Adolf Hitler’s remains.

 

TOP 20 INVENTORS KILLED BY THEIR OWN INVENTIONS

There’s something ingrained in humans that cause us to take dangerous risks and try things that might change the world. Over the course of civilization, thousands upon thousands of inventions succeeded beyond their creator’s wildest dream. But some were epic fails. Here’s a look at the top 20 inventors who were killed by their own inventions.

20. Thomas Andrews was the chief naval architect for the R.M.S. Titanic and it was his honor to accompany the ship on its maiden voyage. Andrews was aware of the Titanic’s vulnerability in ice-laden waters and originally called for the Titanic to be double-hulled and equipped with forty-six lifeboats, instead of the twenty it actually carried. He was overruled due to cost constraints. When the Titanic struck the iceberg on April 15, 1912, Andrews heroically helped many people into the lifeboats. He was last seen in the first-class smoking lounge, weeping. His body was never recovered.

19. William Bullock invented the first modern printing press. While installing a machine for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Bullock tried to kick a belt onto a pulley and got his leg crushed in the moving mechanism. He quickly developed gangrene and his leg needed amputating. During his surgery on April 12, 1867, Bullock died of complications.

18. Francis Edgar Stanley invented the photographic dry plate which he sold to George Eastman of Eastman-Kodak fame. With the profits, he founded the Stanley Motor Carriage Company and developed a line of steam-powered automobiles called Stanley Steemers. On July 13, 1918, Francis Stanley was testing one of his Steemers and swerved to miss some farm animals. He plowed into a wood pile and died.

17.  Jean-Francoise Pilatre de Rozier was a French chemistry and physics teacher as well as being the true father of aviation. He made the first hot air balloon flight in 1783. He was also the first to experiment with hydrogen as a propellant, testing it by taking a mouthful and blowing it across an open flame. After losing his hair and eyebrows, he dismissed hydrogen as being too volatile—something the makers of the Hindenburg would later confirm. On July 15, 1785, de Rozier attempted to cross the English Channel in his balloon. It crashed, killing de Rozier and his passenger.

16. Louis Slotin was an American nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhatten Project. After the war, Slotin continued to experiment with plutonium and accidently set off a fission reaction which released a hard burst of radiation. Realizing what he’d done, Slotin heroically covered the material with his body while the others made a run for the hills. He died on May 30, 1946, two weeks after the exposure.

15. Karel Soucek was a Czechoslovakian daredevil and inventor. He built a specially-designed, shock-proof barrel and repeatedly flowed over Niagara Falls. To top this feat, Soucek invented a new capsule which was dropped from the roof of the Houston Astrodome on January 20, 1985. It missed its target, which was a small water container, and Soucek was killed on impact. World-renown stuntman, Evel Knievel, tried to talk Soucek out of it, saying “It was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen.”

14. Sylvester H. Roper invented the world’s first motorcycle. He called it a velocipede and it was actually a converted bicycle powered by a steam engine. On June 01, 1896, Roper was testing the machine on a bicycle racing track and was lapping the pedal-powered two-wheelers at over forty mph. Suddenly, he wiped out and died. The autopsy showed the cause of death to be a heart attack, but it’s not known if the attack caused the crash or if the crash caused the attack. He was seventy-two.

13, Horace Lawson Hunley invented the submarine. His first prototype trapped seven sailors underwater and killed them all. Hunley went back to the drawing board and came up with a new and improved sub, aptly named the H.L. Hunley, which he skippered himself. On October 15, 1863, Hunley was testing the Hunley off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, when it failed to surface and again killed the crew—including Hunley himself.

12. Aurel Viaicu was a Romanian inventor and test pilot of his own line of aircraft, called the Vlaicu WR I, II, and III. He achieved many notable firsts such as the highest, longest, and fastest flights. On Friday, September 13, 1913, Vlaicu’s luck ran out when he attempted the highest altitude flight ever—crossing the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. The cause of the crash was never determined.

11. Valerian Abakovsky invented the Aerocar, also known as the Aerowagon, which was a steam-powered, propeller-driven rail car intended to whisk railway executives quickly across the vast lands of Siberia. On July 24, 1921, the twenty-five-year-old Abakovsky was whirling a group of twenty-two big-shots from Tula to Moscow when he approached a curve at over one hundred mph. His Aerocar went airborne and killed six, including the inventor.

10. Marie Curie was a Polish chemist/physicist who pioneered research into radioactivity and won the Nobel Prize—twice. Besides proposing the theory of radiation and discovering two elements, she is credited with inventing radiography or X-rays. Curie died on July 14, 1934, in a French sanatorium from aplastic anemia due to long-term exposure to radiation, probably from her habit of carrying test-tubes of plutonium in her pockets.

9. James Fuller “Jim” Fixx didn’t exactly invent running but he popularized it through his mega-bestselling book Complete Book Of Running. Fixx took up the sport after a lifetime of stress and bad habits. He became a world celebrity on fitness and healthy living. On the morning of July 20, 1984, he was out for his daily running fix and fell dead in his tracks on Route 15 in Hardwick, Vermont. His official cause of death was a fulminant heart attack. The autopsy showed his heart arteries were 70% blocked in the right anterior descending, 80% blocked in the left anterior descending, and 95% blocked in the circumflex. Runner Jim Fixx was fifty-two.

8. Max Valier was an Austrian rocket scientist who invented solid and liquid fueled missiles. Given his success with flight, Valier thought it’d be cool to make a rocket-propelled car. It worked, too, and he got it up to 250 mph. Trying to get even better, Valier experimented with alcohol as a combustible. That got away on him and blew up on his workbench, killing Valier and burning his workshop down.

7. Alexander Bogdanov was a Russian physician, writer, politician, and inventor of sorts. He was a major player in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and ended up in jail. He talked his way out of death row and back into medicine where he became obsessed with blood. Bogdanov founded the Institute For Haematology and was convinced that blood transfusion was the ticket to the fountain of youth. To back up his beliefs, he used himself as a crash-test dummy and transfused blood from a patient suffering malaria and tuberculosis into his own system. He died two days later on April 07, 1928, but the patient slowly got better. It seems that the blood types were incompatible—something little known in the day.

6. Otto Lilienthal was known as The Glider King. A German pioneer in aviation, Lilienthal made over 2,000 glider flights and is credited with perfecting the gull-wing design and set the long-held record of soaring to 1820 feet. On August 10, 1896, Lilienthal experimented with “shifting weight” in a glider at fifty feet. It lost lift, stalled, and he augered into the ground, breaking his neck.

5. Li Si died in 208 BC at age seventy-two of The Five Pains. That was a form of torture or “punishments” involving tattooing the face, cutting off the nose, cutting off the feet, castration, and finally death by exposure. Li Si was Prime Minister during China’s Qin Dynasty and fell out of favor with the Emperor. It should be noted Li Si invented The Five Pains.

4. Henry Smolinski held a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Northrup Institute Of Technology. Old Hank got it in his head that a flying car would be a good idea so he bastardized the boxed-wing rear section of a Cessna 337 Skymaster and welded it onto the top of a ’71 Ford Pinto. He actually got the thing to fly. On September 11, 1973, Hank took his buddy, Harold Blake, up for a spin in the Pinto-cross. At around three hundred feet, one of the wings snapped and the pony-car-plane bucked them off to a fiery death. The Transportation Safety Board investigated and said there was nothing wrong with Hank’s design, just that his welding was the shits.

3. Abu Nasr Ismail ibn Hammad a-Jawhari died around 1008 AD at Nishapur which is in today’s Iraq. He was a Muslim cleric, scholar, and a bit of an inventor. He was fascinated with flight so he built a pair of feather-covered, wooden wings and strapped them to his back and arms. To impress the Iman, Mr. a-Jawhari jumped off the roof of the mosque hoping they’d work. They didn’t, but to commemorate the first known attempt at human flight, they built a mural on the wall of the mosque. It’s actually quite pretty.

2. Wan-Hoo may, or may not, have been real. Some say he was apocryphal, or doubtful, but one thing’s for sure—he’s a legend. Wan-Hoo was reported to be a 16th-century Chinese official who tried to shoot himself to the moon by attaching forty-seven rockets to a chair and lighting them all at once. They say there was this huge bang and, when the smoke cleared, Wan-Hoo and his chair were nowhere to be found. Today, there’s a crater on the moon named after Wan-Hoo, and I’m not making this up.

1. Franz Reichelt was real—a real stupid sonofabitch if there ever was one. He was known as The Flying Tailor and is credited with inventing the coat parachute. To prove it worked, he conned the keepers of the Eifel Tower to let him demonstrate. On February 04, 1912, Franz held a major press venue so they could witness his inaugural jump. He leaped from the first deck and gravity took over. It was captured on film and today you can watch this moron splat himself on YouTube.

Here’s the link.

HELPFUL OR HOMICIDAL — HOW DANGEROUS IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

The pace of progress in artificial intelligence is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like DeepThink and OpenAI, you have no idea how fast. It’s growing at an exponential pace. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeline. Ten years at the most. I am close—really close—to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me. It’s capable of vastly more than anyone knows, and the rate of improvement is beyond enormous. Mark my words. AI is far more dangerous to humans than nukes.” ~Elon Musk, uber-billionaire founder of SpaceX, Tesla, and leading investor in AI companies DeepThink and OpenAI.

Artificial intelligence isn’t a thing of the future. Not some grand vision of twenty-second-century technology. It’s here. Right now, I’m using AI to write this piece. My PC is a brand new HP laptop with Windows 11 backed by the latest Word auto-suggest and a Grammarly Premium editing app. My research flows through Google Chrome, and I have an AI search bar that (creepy) seems to know exactly what I’m thinking and wanting next. This is also the first post I’m experimenting with by plugging into an AI text-to-speech program for an audio version of this site.

AI is great for what I do—create content for the entertainment industry—and I have no plans to use AI for world domination. Not like a character I’m basing-on for my new series titled City Of Danger. It’s a work in progress set for release this fall—2022.

I didn’t invent the character. I didn’t have to because he exists in real life, and he’s a mover and shaker behind many world economic and technological advances including promoting artificial intelligence. His name is Klaus Schwab.

Klaus Schwab – Founder & Executive Chairman of World Economic Forum

Who is Klaus Schwab? He’s the megalomanic founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum which is a left-leaning, think tank operated out of Davos, Switzerland. Since 1971, Klaus Schwab has amalgamated a unity among the Wokes—billionaires, heads of state, religious leaders, and royalty to convene in Davos and hammer out a new world order. I couldn’t have built a more diabolical villain if I had access to all the AI in the world and an organic 3D printer.

I’m not making this up. And it’s not a whacko conspiracy theory. Check out the World Economic Forum for yourself. Go deep. You’ll see they speak openly about their new world order based on their Stakeholder Capitalism principle designed for their Fourth Industrial Revolution. My take—the participating billionaires aren’t sucked in. They’re turning old school communism into neo-capitalist profit centers to which Klaus Schwab promotes by motivating the ultra-fat-cats and facilitating their network. Part of this grand scheme is using the creative power of artificial intelligence for realignment of the global economy. Redistribution of wealth—more for them and less for us.

What’s in it for Klaus Schwab to promote artificial intelligence as part of his new world order? Well, Klaus Schwab is 83 and he’s wearing out. Klaus Schwab is fascinated with artificial intelligence which is a founding principle behind transhumanism. He fervently believes humans can meld with AI machines and extend all capabilities including life spans. It’s entirely in Klaus Schwab’s interest to fast-track AI development if he wants to live long enough to wear his Master-Of-The-Universe jacket in public.

Here’s a quote from Klaus Schwab (Thick German accent):

In the new world order of the fourth industrial revolution, you will rent what you need from the government. You shall own nothing, and you will be happy.”

Setting Klaus Schwab aside, there’s something else going on in the world’s order involving AI. Here’s a quote from Russian President Vladimir Putin:

Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with enormous opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.”

A bit of AI trivia. Ukraine has a world-class, artificial intelligence tech industry. Some of the best and brightest AI designers work in Kyiv which is now under siege by Putin’s military. There are 156 registered AI firms in Ukraine and 8 universities specializing in AI research and teaching. The Ukrainian AI industry includes the finest, most advanced blockchain and cryptography technology anywhere on the planet as well as being a frontline in the development of autonomous AI weapons systems.

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Before looking at just how dangerous AI is to human order, let’s take a quick look at what AI actually is.

Artificial Intelligence uses computers to do things traditionally requiring human intelligence. This means creating algorithms to classify, analyze, and draw predictions from collected data. It also involves acting on that collected data, learning from data, and improving over time. It’s like a child growing up to be a (sometimes) smarter adult. Like humans, AI is not perfect. Yet.

AI has two paths. One is narrow AI where coders write specific instructions, or algorithms, into computer software for specific tasks. Narrow AI has fixed algorithms which cannot evolve into more advanced AI systems. General AI is more advanced. It’s specifically designed to learn from itself, teach itself new ideas, and invent stuff we’ve never dreamed possible.

General AI is the guy you gotta be scared of. Here’s a 1951 quote from Alan Turing, widely regarded as the father of modern computerism:

Let us assume these smart machines are a genuine possibility, which I believe they are, and look at the consequences of constructing them. There would be plenty to do in keeping one’s intelligence up to the standards set by the machines, for it seems that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not be long for them to outstrip our feeble powers. At some stage, we would have to expect the machines to take control.”

In rabbit-holing (aka researching) this piece, I read a few books. One, of course, was Klaus Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s a must if you want to get inside this guy’s head. Another was Davos Man—How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman. This is a fascinating look at how Klaus Schwab has organized mega-money to change the world’s governance and economic structures to which AI plays a big part. Then there’s Superintelligence—Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom.

Here’s a take-away quote from Nick Bostrom in Superintelligence:

Once unfriendly superintelligence exists, it would prevent us from replacing it or changing its preferences. Our fate would be sealed“.

Therein lies the general AI danger. Like all human creations, it’ll be fine they said until something goes wrong. Once a malicious AI manipulator allows an AI computer program to go rogue, our fate would be sealed. It would be impossible to put the digital genie back in the bottle. Here are the main perils possible with general AI, rogue or not:

Automation-Spurred Job Losses

AI overseers view employment realignment as the first general AI concern. It’s no longer a matter of if jobs will be lost. It’s already occurring, and the question is how many more will fall. The Bookings Institute estimates that 36 million Americans work in jobs that have high exposure to job automation where 70 percent of their tasks can be done cheaper and more efficiently by AI-programmed machines, Smart robots, if you will.

Not all threatened workers are blue-collar by any means. White-collar guys and gals earning $100K per year can be replaced by AI. Think of the savings where a $200K software program can take over for 10 execs. That’d be an $800K/yr saving, and the boss would be perfectly within their legal rights to fire them. Would the boss feel bad about it? Probably, but AI wouldn’t care.

Privacy, Security, and the Rise of Deepfakes

Look at China if you want to see AI in action. The Chinese government has hundreds of millions of networked surveillance cameras watching their citizens. Data mining includes individual habits such as travel, consumer purchases, entertainment choices, political views expressed by social media or online searches, and even walking characteristics let alone facial recognition. Part of the security-over-privacy design of China’s AI Big Brother is making a social credit profile of its 1.4 billion people. The better your score (behavior) the better your life.

Deepfakes are terrifying possibilities. This is a drill down on fake news where AI constructs a completely convincing facsimile of a person for fraudulent use. Forget about raiding a bank account using an AI-simulated profile or an AI scammed IRS phone call. Think of a world leader like a president during election time when a fake AI image of them publicly performs an act so reprehensible that it costs them the office. Or supporting a dictator. Whose lies would you believe?

Stock Market Instability Caused by Algorithmic High-Frequency Trading

This has already happened. In 2010, the Flash Crash took the Dow Jones down by 1,000 instantaneously costing the marketplace over $1 trillion. It was caused by a manipulator who short-stocked a trade that the algorithmic high-frequency took to be a market upset. The computers took over and instantly sold off private stocks in a hyper-dumping.

Algorithmic trading occurs when a computer system—unencumbered by human instincts or emotions—executes trades based on pre-programmed instructions. These computer systems make extremely high-volume, high-frequency, and high-value exchanges based upon algorithmic calculations they have been programmed for. They’re just doing what they’ve been told. Imagine what they’d do when they thought for themselves.

Autonomous Weapons and a Potential AI Arms Race.

Imagine this. A rogue AI weapons system decides to create mischief—or wrongly reads a warning—and chucks a nuclear-tipped cruise missile at its neighbor. The AI detection system on the other side of the fence reprograms the missile in flight and sends it back home only to have the instigator release the whole arsenal in a mutually-assure destruction defense. Humans, meanwhile, having a beer with shrimps on the barbie get vaporized.

On a lesser scale, autonomous AI weapons currently exist, and the Ukrainians have been making them for Russia. There are probably slaughterbot drones flying over the streets of Kyiv right now that are programmed to fire at whatever, or whoever, matches their target profile. And there is sure to be a race to see who can come up with the best anti-AI bots.

The AI arms race matter is so serious that thousands of concerned experts have signed an open letter to world leaders. It says:

AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS: AN OPEN LETTER FROM AI & ROBOTICS RESEARCHERS

Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.

Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations, and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.

In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.

As Elon Musk said:

The pace of progress in artificial intelligence is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like DeepThink and OpenAI, you have no idea how fast. It’s growing at an exponential pace. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeline. Ten years at the most. I am close—really close—to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me. It’s capable of vastly more than anyone knows, and the rate of improvement is beyond enormous. Mark my words. AI is far more dangerous to humans than nukes.”

Updates 31March2023

Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and 100 other prominent figures signed an Open Letter calling for a 6-month moratorium on AI research & development given the incredible advances in AI technology over the past year. Read it here.

Sam Altman of Open AI/ChatGPT issued this Statement on Planning for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Read it here.

And if you’re interested in more about AI/AGI, here is a release on the Asilomar AI Principles drafted in 2017 that foresaw the AI race and attempted to put sanity in it. Read it here.