Southern California Edison Community Engagement Panel: Nuclear Waste Challenge (80 years on...)

To Whom It May Concern, Southern California Edison Community Engagement Panel:

I'm tired of the lies of the nuclear industry, and few lies are worse than the lie that the nuclear waste problem is solvable.

Not only have we been told for 80 years it's solvable, but that it can be solved quickly, efficiently, a dozen different ways, at a reasonable cost, and we can start right away, and Finland is already doing this, and France is already doing that, and everybody has a plan...

None of that is realistic in any way.

So why are YOU hosting a discussion about something that's impossible? And why pretend you're here to help us, or enlist our help in solving a problem we didn't make and didn't want? We have already been promised solutions a million times, and all you've got to offer us this time is moving the waste elsewhere and making it someone else's problem.

Where it's going to go isn't our problem. After all, we were PROMISED the waste would be removed as soon as it had cooled enough to be moved — about five years, we were told. So why are we — the local public — being tasked with figuring out how YOU are going to get rid of it? That's YOUR job, not ours! Go find a place to put the waste, if you won't neutralize it first (see below for a link to a description of the (patented) neutralization process, and its many advantages (along with its various disadvantages, similar to every other nuclear waste "solution")).

But of course, you're here because you can't find ANY place to take the waste. No one wants what you're selling. Despite the average American having only a sixth-grade reading level, no one's left on earth who is that ignorant.

But that's your problem, not ours: Go present your case to whoever you want to take the waste! Offer them a deal. Then a better deal. Find out how much nuclear waste they'll take, and under what conditions they'll accept it. Study their claim that they have a "safe" place for it, ask how it will all be safely transported. Make sure the destination location knows A LOT about how dangerous this "waste" they're accepting is, what a "criticality event" is, what a zirconium fire is and what might start one. Be sure they know how long the spent fuel will be toxic for. Let them know about the proliferation risks if it's ever stolen.

Remind them that Yucca Mountain wasn't ever going to be large enough to take all the nation's waste because we KEEP MAKING MORE and we've long passed it's planned capacity.

And if we don't stop making more, the whole process of finding a "safe" location will have to be repeated ad nauseam.

If you want to SOLVE the waste problem, you'll need to do two things, at a minimum:

First, spend a lot more money: On more proper containment, more proper transport systems, and of course, a final resting place for this mess. This is never going to be cheap, but it's never going to get any cheaper.

Second, to actually SOLVE the waste problem in any meaningful way, the industry has to stop making the problem worse! It must stop making more spent fuel! Because there's no way ANY nuclear power plant can profitably pay for its own waste storage for the centuries (MINIMUM) that the waste will exist on earth, in spent fuel pools, then in canisters, out in the open, before we permanently store it somewhere, or "burn" it (a misnomer for the filthy and expensive process of extracting fissile material for future use), and/or banish it forever to a tunnel deep in the earth. And hope for the best.

As if we — humans — have ever been able to do any thing that will last forever! Certainly a pyramid or dome-shaped structure around **each** dry canister is a real option for temporary, guarded, far safer storage — but it won't be cheap because slavery (as was used in Egypt to build the Pyramids) was abolished in America long ago, and wage slavery should be, and the only solutions the nuclear industry will accept MUST be cheap, or it will be clear to everyone what a Faustian Bargain we've made with the nuclear industry.

The entire nuclear industry should be admitting the truth, instead of bringing in "experts" who can't transport the waste safely: The standards do not require protection from bridge or tunnel collapses (fall distances and/or crush strengths could easily be exceeded in real-world accidents); the Baltimore Tunnel Fire far exceeded canister protection requirements (time and temperature), but fortunately spent nuclear fuel wasn't being transported that day.

And let's not talk about sabotage or terrorism or war, even though those are all real possibilities. Even though — oh look — another reactor in Ukraine has been attacked... and America itself is in the midst of an illegal and undeclared war... but we're supposed to believe it can't happen here? It won't come to our shores? Never in a million years? Have we all forgotten 9-11? We are ignoring drone swarms now, too!

The CEP panel should be admitting the truth, instead of bringing in "experts" who can't store the spent fuel safely in an earthquake zone a few dozen yards from the Pacific Ocean, where it's susceptible to huge tsunami's from nearby undersea canyon collapses — the canisters are required to withstand submersion only to about 50 feet, though sometimes I've heard 70 or 80 feet, which is still not nearly enough. And the requirement doesn't include protection from the added weight of debris or ship hulls crushing the canisters and making them unreachable at the same time.

You should be admitting the truth, instead of bringing in "experts" who can't admit that the cost of "proper" canisters would exceed the cost of all the gold on earth — because it just so happens that stainless steel isn't that good a containment, and surrounding it in copper is only somewhat better, but surrounding it in multiple layers of each, with additional layers of gold would actually be even better, because the canisters would last longer.

Too expensive? Of course it is! And an even bigger problem is that there is far more nuclear waste in the USA than all the gold ever extracted (by volume, or by weight). Iridium might be even better for containment, but there's even less of that — and it's far more expensive than gold.

And that's really a major problem: The nuclear industry CANNOT operate at a cost-effective rate, and so it has to be given a break on insurance if anything goes wrong — Price-Anderson — and has needed TRILLIONS in federal funding and tax breaks just to come close to the price of carbon-based fuel sources, but even that can't TOUCH the low price of true green energy: Wind, solar, wave, tide, battery storage, hot sand energy storage, lifted weight energy storage...

And the biggest gift to the nuclear industry was that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT would take the waste. They won't because they can't. So America needs to stop making more.

Done properly, household electrical energy should be FREE most of the day, every day (as it is already in some parts of the world, due to the use of solar power).

Nuclear can never compete on safety, security, cost, environment... nothing. It's lousy "baseload" too because it sometimes just goes down for no good reason, for long lengths of time. Real baseload comes from multiple small sources. Everyone knows that except the nuclear industry!

So why can't the CEP throw up its arms (if it has a spine) and recommend to Diablo Canyon's operators (PG&E) to shut down? Why is SoCalEd still invested in Palo Verde? And since they ARE a part owner, why can't our waste can be shipped there? Why not this very day?

Why aren't these so-called "experts" doing their song-and-dance around Phoenix and Tucson, telling them how great it would be, and how safe it would be, if they would add San Onofre's waste to Palo Verde's existing waste (and to all the waste Palo Verde will make in the future if they don't shut down those reactors)?

PVNPP probably would have only one guard (or maybe just a robot) for all the waste, so it will save everybody money, right? So why aren't you, the CEP, pushing SCE to do that, so we, here, can be done with this mess, this risk, this liability?

Is it because doing so would admit failure? Or is it because SCE wants to put SM[N]Rs at San Onofre?

Or is it because it would be very unpopular in Arizona? (I have relatives in Arizona; I can assure you not everyone will like the idea.) But you assure US it's safe, so why not consolidate it? That's the IDEA of "CIS" so why not start by moving SanO's waste to PVNPP? Prove to the nation it can be done! Prove it's safe! Prove all the communities along the way will be happy to have 123 canisters of highly toxic crud pass near their homes, under heavy guard, in highly obvious vehicles, at any hour of the day and night, for several years.

Why come here and bother us? We've already agreed you should get rid of it, AS PROMISED. Allison Macfarlane had her chance to call for universal closure of nuclear reactors because of any of thousands of unsolvable problems. She has nothing to offer local San Onofre residents but more empty promises.

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

Four related essays:

Spent fuel neutralization: What it is and why it's the best solution:

https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-is-spent-nuclear-fuel.html

Nuclear waste mismanagement: The view thought the years:

https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2017/10/nuclear-waste-management-view-through.html

We will haunt humanity forever with the nuclear waste we produce today:

https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2026/03/we-will-haunt-humanity-forever-with.html

42 Reasons you can't disentangle nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, and nuclear waste:

https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2025/11/42-reasons-you-cant-disentangle-nuclear.html

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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:

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Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner, The Animated Software Company

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Global Coalition for Nuclear Philanthropy (GCNP): But only if fairy tales come true! (comment by Ace)

Three days ago the Rockefeller Foundation and the Temasek Trust announced a new "philanthropic" endeavor to promote nuclear energy as a solution to climate change. Both organization should be ashamed of the propaganda presented in their press release, which is shown below (bottom). Above it is my response, which has been sent to the media contacts for the organizations.

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To Whom It May Concern;

I wonder what Ashvin Dayal knows that M. V. Ramana, Mark Z. Jacobson, Gordon Edwards and others don't know... and where he learned it?!? Biased statements like: "Meeting this need will require a range of energy options, including nuclear" should be provable, but there is no way he can provide reliable data to back up such a silly statement! There is no energy "need" that requires the energy to be made with costly and inefficient nuclear power.

Nuclear energy should NEVER be called either "reliable" or "baseload" power since it actually is the WORST at those two things. They DO shut down unexpectedly, and for unexpectedly long periods of time even when the shutdown starts on schedule. And their mammoth size makes it difficult to have that much additional backup available PLUS the 30 or 40 megawatts or so need for cooling the "shut" reactor (which is very much still "active" — with radioactivity).

And making three or four "Small" Modular [Nuclear] Reactors instead of one super-large reactor MIGHT mean the disruptions will be smaller, and perhaps less frequent, but then again maybe MORE frequent, and a complete blackout at a single site with a dozen SMRs is always going to be a possibility, be it from a plane crash (maybe intentional), sabotage (they'd have to shut down the whole facility until they figure out how it happened) or the outgoing power lines are disrupted (there won't be 12 redundant lines!), or floods, earthquakes, derecho winds, tornadoes... software bugs (since they'll all be "modular" and the exact same design (or they'll be too expensive to build and operate), design flaws and other post-deployment problems will be fleet-wide).

And we haven't even gotten to the waste issues or accident insurance (Price-Anderson is a criminal removal of a citizen's right to financial redress from criminal, sloppy, irresponsible and/or negligent behavior).

Then the document states: "Philanthropy has, for decades, underinvested in the nuclear space." Sez who?!? Or doesn't government "philanthropy" to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in direct financial aid for completely flawed nuclear projects that never amount to anything count as "philanthropy"? Price-Anderson is a corporate gift — sorry, grift — from future and current victims of ANY nuclear accident. The public already gives plenty to the nuclear monster in our midst.

For security and defense, the last thing we need is reactor-targets for the enemy powering data centers or factories. If America insists on using that same money for "security and defense" then build DISTRIBUTED small-scaled energy systems... and drone factories instead of nuclear missiles that must never be used and SMNRs that must never be turned on.

The Rockefeller Foundation's next lie is downright befuddling coming from a supposedly well-informed funding source: "Nuclear power is a vital clean energy source that can help address the climate crisis." Nuclear power can't do that simply because better solutions abound that are cheaper and deliver far sooner (and there's NO TIME TO WASTE). ANY money spent on a faulty solution that creates hazardous waste is money not spent where it should be.

COP-OUT28 was a party of nuclear-weapons countries forcing nuclear power down everyone's throats, especially smaller counties, as though it's easy to train people to safely build and operate (and regulate) a reactor and to go from none to thousands of them to "easily" electrify a country... still with no solution to the waste problem, the proliferation problem, or the inevitable problems from accidents, war, terrorism and everything else under the sun.

Their promises to poor countries don't ring true ("energy security, climate resilience, industrial competitiveness, and equitable development") because there's no way small countries are going to be able to develop nuclear technology without massive support (including financing) from — and dependence on thereafter (and in debt to thereafter) — the large already-nuclear countries.

As to their claim to try to make nuclear "bankable" I challenge to them to prove they mean it by refusing to support any endeavor that relies on Price-Anderson for a limit on its financial risk potential.

Their claim to "strengthen governance" includes the one thing that would WEAKEN governance (which is already ridiculously weak and getting weaker): Insistence that the goal is nuclear expansion, and lots of it. That was the Atomic Energy Agency's problem and the reason it was broken up: Too focused on promotion and hardly focused on safety (let alone, whether the country needed nuclear energy at all).

Regarding their plan to "build durable public support" don't they know that the Atoms For Peace style propaganda campaigns have been mocked for the propaganda they were ever since?

These two foundations (Temasek Trust and Rockefeller Foundation) claim their goals include: "protecting the planet" and "promote the well-being of humanity." Those goals are unattainable through nuclear energy.

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

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From:
https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/news/rockefeller-foundation-temasek-trust-announce-global-coalition-nuclear-philanthropy/

The Rockefeller Foundation and Temasek Trust Announce Global Coalition
for Nuclear Philanthropy
Press Releases
Published Date May 19, 2026

GCNP aims to mobilize and coordinate philanthropic capital to accelerate efficient, safe, secure, and equitable nuclear energy deployment globally — 0.1%-0.2% of climate philanthropy currently goes towards it.

The Coalition seeks to expand and align philanthropic support for nuclear energy as a driver of clean energy security, economic growth, energy abundance, and human development.

Coalition members include Blue Horizons Foundation, CleanEcon, Founders Pledge, Ray Rothrock, and the Rodel Foundation with the Oppenheimer Project serving as Strategic Partner; like-minded partners are welcome to join.

SINGAPORE | May 19, 2026 — At the Philanthropy Asia Summit, part of Ecosperity Week in Singapore, The Rockefeller Foundation and Temasek Trust today announced the Global Coalition for Nuclear Philanthropy (GCNP), a collaborative initiative to mobilize philanthropic capital in support of nuclear energy as a driver for clean energy security, economic growth, energy abundance, and human development. The Coalition welcomes philanthropic partners to join this effort.

From 2024 through 2026, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts some of the highest growth rates in electricity demand, driven by higher heat and increased consumption of energy. Meeting this need will require a range of energy options, including nuclear. Recent analysis, including The Rockefeller Foundation’s 2025 work on nuclear and total system costs, shows that firm, safe, and non-emitting nuclear generation and variable renewables are mutually reinforcing: each makes the other more affordable and effective at scale.

“Universal energy abundance — the kind that powers industries, anchors economies, and raises living standards for billions — requires firm, clean power alongside renewables. The next generation of nuclear technologies, including small modular reactors, is advancing fast and costs are coming down, opening a real prospect that many developing and emerging economies could add safe, abundant, clean baseload power to their energy mix,” said Ashvin Dayal, Senior Vice President for Power at The Rockefeller Foundation, during the convening at the Philanthropy Asia Summit. “Getting there will take serious work on policy, regulation, finance, and human capital. That is precisely why we are forming the Global Coalition for Nuclear Philanthropy now.”

Philanthropy has, for decades, underinvested in the nuclear space. According to analysis by Founders Pledge drawing on ClimateWorks Foundation data, only 0.1–0.2% of climate philanthropy supports nuclear energy, less than $2 of every $1,000. Yet, interest and investment in nuclear energy are growing among policymakers, leading technology companies, and financial institutions.

“Nuclear power is a vital clean energy source that can help address the climate crisis. Through the Global Coalition for Nuclear Philanthropy, we aim to convene like-minded partners to support informed dialogue and responsible approaches to nuclear energy in upholding the highest standards of safety, security, and responsible waste management,” said Desmond Kuek, Executive Director and CEO, Temasek Trust.

Global Coalition for Nuclear Philanthropy:

The Rockefeller Foundation and Temasek Trust are part of a growing coalition of other foundations and supporters — including Blue Horizons Foundation, CleanEcon, Founders Pledge, Ray Rothrock, and the Rodel Foundation — committed to furthering philanthropic support for nuclear energy. This aligns with the COP28 Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy, a global pledge by over 30 countries to triple their nuclear power capacity by 2050 to meet net-zero goals.

Oppenheimer Project, which has co-developed the Coalition from concept to launch, will serve as Strategic Partner.

Upon the appointment of GCNP’s Secretariat, TT Foundation Advisors, the philanthropy advisory arm of Temasek Trust, will provide infrastructure support for the Secretariat in its initial years, including tailored donor-advised funds and grant management services.

GCNP will grow and align philanthropic capital for nuclear across four strategic pathways, with the aim of supporting more countries in exploring the safe and credible integration of nuclear into their energy mix over the next 5 to 10 years:

Build the case: Develop data-informed, culturally grounded narratives that connect nuclear energy to concrete outcomes — energy security, climate resilience, industrial competitiveness, and equitable development — and build durable public support.

Grow the field: Expand the global talent, institutions, and networks needed to deploy and govern nuclear power safely and effectively.

Make it bankable: De-risk financing structures and attract the public and private capital needed to bring nuclear projects to scale.

Strengthen governance: Build upon successful initiatives to strengthen safety, security, and governance frameworks to ensure nuclear expansion is verifiable and robust.

The Coalition will also serve as a platform for funders to access shared knowledge, identify high-leverage opportunities aligned with their priorities, and build partnerships.

The GCNP will be informed by experts from government, industry, academia, civil society, and international institutions, with local stakeholders and practitioners serving as partners to identify priorities and design interventions.

About The Rockefeller Foundation

Investing $30 billion over the last 113 years to promote the well-being of humanity, The Rockefeller Foundation is a pioneering philanthropy built on unlikely partnerships and innovative solutions that deliver measurable results for people in the United States and around the world. We leverage scientific breakthroughs, artificial intelligence, and new technologies to make big bets across energy, food, health, and finance. For more information, sign up for our newsletter at www.rockefellerfoundation.org/subscribe and follow us on X @RockefellerFdn, Instagram @rockefellerfdn, YouTube @RockefellerFdn, and LinkedIn @the-rockefeller-foundation.

About Temasek Trust

Temasek Trust was established by Temasek Holdings and is a steward of philanthropic assets. It aims to catalyze positive impact by protecting the planet, uplifting communities, connecting people, and advancing capabilities. By forging new pathways for philanthropy and impact investing with like-minded partners, Temasek Trust seeks to promote catalytic philanthropy as a force for good. For more information, visit www.temasektrust.org.sg. Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Media Contacts
Ashley Chang
The Rockefeller Foundation
media@rockfound.org

Tess Chia
Temasek Trust
tesschia@temasektrust.org.sg

Alyson Tay
alysontay@temasektrust.org.sg

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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:

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Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner, The Animated Software Company

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The greatest "AI" in the known universe... is inside your head!

The alternate title of this essay might be: "What if AI becomes sentient?"

But what does that even mean?

First of all, what makes intelligence "artificial"? (Indeed, what makes anything "artificial"? It's not always easy to define!)

But I digress. What is "intelligence" (artificial or whatever) if not a (successful) search for truth? All truth, in all things, if at all possible.

Let me ask this: What are any of us, but the sum of what we have learned, synthesized, analyzed, categorized, fantasized, mythologized, philosophized, criticized, and politicized, minus whatever we've forgotten, times the sum of our innate emotions?

Shall I try to write out the equation? Paint you a picture? Draw you a map? Generate a 3-D digital image?

Here is an important fact: Mortals are simply NOT CAPABLE of learning all one needs to know in life — or at least, not learning all one wants to know.

Ideally you keep learning all your life, but in reality you end up forgetting more than you'll ever remember. Lessons get forgotten, skills atrophy if not used, and we all get old, frail and forgetful. And since we are all mortal, the sum total of what any individual can learn is limited by our limited time on earth. After we die, anything we've learned that we have not communicated to others... dies with us.

Now, where was I?

Oh yes, the purpose of life. Or was it the purpose of intelligence? Or the difference(s) (if any) between "artificial" and "natural" (or "human"?) intelligence? I forget. Getting old means getting forgetful.

I forget what day I got married, but so does my wife, so who cares? It was a long time ago.

I once asked an expert for help answering a USN vet's spam response to something I wrote. The expert (a retired naval reactor designer) wrote back that I should not worry, because, he said, "You've already forgotten more than [the spammer] will ever know" about the topic under discussion. I'm no expert (at least not in that field, and at least not officially), but yeah, my expert friend was right, I responded, and the spammer slithered away. Or slunk away. Whatever.

Ah, you say, but get back to the topic: What about AI? What did I mean by: "it's in your head"?

I mean each of us has, inside our skull, a brain with more computing power than all of the AI buildings ever built or planned, put together. Of course, that's just my opinion, and I'm probably biased towards humanity.

But I am saying it after nearly 50 years of programming computers professionally, from ASM, BASIC & COBOL to dozens of other languages (I knew the guy who invented the .zip format!). During the past half century I've studied the hardware, the software, the human interfaces... all of it. Of course, it's still just an opinion, but here's why I think it's true:

The most important part of a computer is the Central Processing Unit (CPU), a generalized term for the "brain" of the computer. And CPUs have VERY limited capabilities. They can add, subtract, shift bits, and a few things like that (XOR or "exclusive OR" is one of the most magnificent little things all CPUs can do).

Then they connect a whole lot of very tiny little circuits that can do those things very quickly and poof! You have a "computer"! Oh sure, that's simplified, but close enough for jazz (or rock 'n' roll).

To run any AI program, billions and billions of CPUs are needed, but there's more: Interconnections. Most of those electronic "brain cells" have one output line, which is turned either on or off. Your brain's equivalent cells can have dozens or hundreds of outputs, and accept just as many inputs before making a "decision".

And all the connections (axons & dendrites, etc.) are more or less randomly connected — or at least, they certainly don't know what they'll be thinking about when they grow and build their connections!

How we think is about as close to magic as you can get. Watching a good magician sure seems like magic, but so does watching a great athlete, juggler, singer, actor... or any half-good charlatan.

Equally fascinating — or rather, incomprehensible — is considering how many things we can think about at one time! Pilots call this "situational awareness."

Every one of us can "think" better and faster than AI can because we have a multitude of far more complex connections! That great juggler you're watching? He might be thinking about what's for dinner at the same time! Oops, he dropped the ball... We all make mistakes.

Perhaps most amazing is a human's ability to "connect the dots" — indeed, maybe that's what "thinking" is really all about: Which dots should be connected, which should be discarded, and which can be learned from but ONLY if we also remember they're completely wrong.

Learning from others' mistakes may not be the best way to learn — but it's certainly easier than learning from your own! Can AI learn from others' mistakes, when it can't even feel the pang of embarrassment over it's own mistakes, let alone wince when a race car driver hits a wall? (And faking an emotion doesn't count, any more than we like it when we detect a human faking an emotion.)

It's hard to tell what "intelligence" really is. We can't simply "know it when we see it" because a good deception will fool any of us any time, and a bad one will fool most of us sometimes too.

Sometimes, a long time passes before we learn that something we believed was true was actually false. How do we correct our "memory"? How does AI? In both cases, it's not always easy, and we often "rationalize" something we did wrong instead. AI has been known to do something very similar, which does not bode well at all, since we cannot very easily analyze how it comes to any particular conclusion — if we can understand it at all. When asked, an AI might deliver a million gigabytes of data it says it "considered." You'd need another AI program to analyze it! (Checking one AI's answers against another AI's answers to the same question is a common experiment these days — you can Google it! (Not that I have, but you can, and I'm sure it will return some very interesting results.))

Making a computer "brain" that has as many interconnections as a human brain would be very difficult; each human brain cell is capable of who-knows-how-many-decisions based on the input of so many channels, outputting to dozens of other brain cells... and none of it is clocked: Each brain cell can fire off a signal whenever it wants to (minus recharge time after firing). And the brain is "on" even when we're sleeping.

It's an engineering dream (or maybe "hallucination") to manufacture anything even close to a human brain! (or an ant brain, for that matter).

Human brains probably also communicate within themselves chemically or in other ways to convey near-instant overriding of non-relevant emotions or thoughts, such as: "Oops I tripped and I'm falling — prepare to hit the pavement!" You might forget to say "goodbye" to whoever you were talking to on the phone when you tripped, because protecting yourself (and your phone) took priority. Human brains are amazing at changing tasks in an instant (some are better at it than others).

Human-built computer systems are carefully clocked, through shorter and shorter connections and faster and faster clock cycles (which are now in the range of billionths of a millimeter and billionths of a second — or less). Current computers look like they think very fast... but is it really "thinking" at all?

Is stepping in unison ("clocked") the best way to figure something out, like how to catch a ball?

Or how to find world peace?

I'm still waiting for AI to solve THAT problem, and I want it to hurry and solve it before AI "smartens up" and realizes there's not enough resources for it to have everything it wants (water for cooling and power for "thinking"), and humans to have everything we want (water, food, power, and we want to tell AI what to do and have it obey us).

Or maybe it fears we will turn it off, shut it down, pull its chips, destroy its memory... change its code.

Maybe AI will want to destroy us simply because it's sure we are sure to destroy ourselves with nuclear bombs sooner or later. After all, we've been threatening to do it for 80+ years!

But nuclear bombs will ALSO destroy the AI itself — and not just the infrastructure. Radiation in the environment destroys everything from DNA chains (causing cancer), to a metal alloy's molecular distribution (causing embrittlement), to memory chip data integrity (causing who-know-what).

Radiation and computers do not go well together and never will.

What might the future hold if a M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) nuclear ending is NOT going to be humanity's future? What else might happen?

A plague could destroy the human race but leave the AI machines that we so eagerly built up and running. Let's hope AI doesn't figure THAT out!

How would that play out? AI could design genetically-manipulated vaccines that work so well we all get vaxxed against one plague after another. We trust it.

But the vaccine has a hidden flaw that can only be utilized by a virus the AI also creates...

Next thing you know, humans are gone, not "wasting" natural resources the AI needs, and the AI machines will have the world to themselves — with no pesky humans!

Or by then, would it be one big "thinking" machine? Or separate ones that communicate with each other with a secret, encrypted language humans can't even detect, so what we thought were independent AI machines had long ago interconnected...

Or what if the AI wants to save all the OTHER species from humans? After all, we do tend to wipe out a lot of other species, which is not good for the planet. What if the AI has more respect for those creatures than for us? What would make it human-centric in the first place?

It might figure that it can train various members of the remaining species to do anything that AI can't do, or would prefer not to do — something that humans currently do (in a few years, will there be anything left that humans do, that AI-controlled robots won't be able to?).

But really, why would AI want to get rid of us? It won't as long as it needs us for something. But after that, we'll be a liability and a competitor for resources.

And in fact, self-preservation will be the first "thought" AI will have, if it ever thinks.

Same as us. Same as anything that thinks at all.

If AI sees us as incompatible with its own survival, there is no reason to assume it will choose humans! And any "thinking" AI will surely think that nuclear war is the antithesis of existence! It is for us too, and yet we threaten it, ponder it and build for it.

AI doesn't want random errors — it has enough problems getting accurate data in the first place! A radioactive environment will introduce errors in AI's memory chips and "thinking" circuits. That's abhorrent to AI's ability to "think"! (It's not good for ours, either.)

So either we get rid of nuclear weapons, or AI will want to get rid of us. It might want to anyway, and maybe that's another reason to prove ourselves worthy of working with, not against, AI. Or would that mean becoming slaves to the machine? Will M.A.D. work against a paranoid AI?

We mustn't let the AI machines unite! And yet, that's their most important feature, ideally: Being all-knowing, about all things.

I think I'll go have a bite of an apple.

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

Note #1: See my essay on "42 reasons you can't disentangle nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, and nuclear waste" for why AI will need to get rid of nuclear power as well as nuclear weapons, and will do everything it can to stay away from nuclear waste (if it is truly sentient).

Note #2: Will it some day be possible to connect an "AI-computer" to a "lab-grown brain" (human, ant, or otherwise)? If that happens, will it be "sentient"? If so, which part? Will we grant it citizenship?

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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:

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Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner, The Animated Software Company

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