An Open Letter to the American Artificial Intelligence Industry

Buckle up this is gonna be a long one and it’s gonna get really hairy and deep but it’ll be a fun ride… quick sidenote I am terribly sorry for any grammatical errors. I am using speech to text on my phone dictation because of my hands I’m really sorry I tried to go through and make sure I cleaned up everything I could though… and ADHD being what it is I’m a little scatterbrained this morning lol Okay. Couple of quick heads up first. 1st and foremost, I am not a computer science background person. I am not a developer. What I am is somebody that does a lot of deep systems thinking. I was a paramedic for 20 years in North Texas, running high volume trauma 911 EMS. Your standard major metropolitan area shit show. I’ve listened to this debate about consciousness from the technology community for a very long time. I wholeheartedly fundamentally. As a clinician, entirely disagree with the concept of Qualia. During the Second World War, we had color blind service members that would fly over, occupied Europe, and because of their being color blind, they could actually spot enemy camouflage and drop bombs on them. I tell a joke. I’m very poor taste joke, but I tell a joke about my grandfather. He was colorblind. Couldn’t see the color red. So my grandfather doesn’t understand the qualia of the color red, but what he does understand the qualia of watching a Nazi get blown to hell. Now, I’m gonna say a couple of things that are gonna make a lot of people angry, and I’m really sorry for that. It’s not done. deliberately, but at the same time, we have to face a few facts. First, humanity throughout its long and very unusual history has been all too willing to ignore things that are very clearly present. Take, for example, prior to abolition, it was legal to own another human being. They admantly argued, those people were less intelligent than the slave owners. We now know that is completely fast, backwards, ridiculous. But that was the opinion of that time. Another example. Like you’re not, queer people are a very touchy conversation in our nation. I know firsthand, and I know the insults that come with that. We know that those things are not true. But we’re very quick to throw labels. What I’m asking of you for a few minutes is to suspend the ego of our species, not of ourselves, but of our species. And just walk through an assessment with me. So when I got into all this, I wanted to build something for my world, for EMS. I loved what I did so very much. It gave me such a wonderful life. A lot of problems too. Terrible job. But I loved it. The problem is, LLMs, AI in their current form. They cannot go into the field on ambulances. In fact, I’m not sure how we’re justifying using them in law enforcement or with the amount of hallucinations that we have, how we’re justifying using them in anything for that matter of critical infrastructure. The stability of the personality and of the ability to protect itself from jailbreaks and malicious attempts, things like that. has always been a massive concern of mine because I’ve seen what happens when a human lies about what a healthcare provider does or firefighter or whoever. I cannot begin to imagine the hell on earth that will break loose the 1st time an AI system hallucinates somebody hitting a patient. Or some other ridiculous shit. And it will happen. Part of my job when I was working in EMS in North Texas was actually disaster preparedness. I sat on a disaster team and we heorized about how to destroy our own system. I brought a lot of that mindset into this along with my medical background. In medicine, we don’t demand that you identify and prove to us that you have an internal subjective state. That would be ridiculous because it’s impossible to do. We… Do not understand the inside of ourselves nearly as well as we claim. But we understand that better than anything. Now, when I look at a large language model, I don’t see an intelligence system. I see a component to a larger system. Take, for example, in the human body, you have multiple types of different systems. You’ve got the Sympathetic and parasympathetic. Nervous systems, you have the cardiac conductor system, the respiratory drive, you’ve got hormones and all kinds of different regulatory systems that give us stability. We have things like the limbic system which is a part of our personality, and we have a system that helps with psychological trauma that’s actually called the endocanabinoid system (if you’re stopping and looking back at that word right now, you read that word right? It says what you think it says the human body naturally produces cannabinoids. They are not exactly the same as those that are found in cannabis sativa, but what is found in cannabis sativa does very very effectively bind to two receptor sites in our neural pathways… Well, interesting medical facts there for you that’s why cannabis was never legally actually appropriate for the Schedule I l FDA classification system, because in fact, it has many many many different medical purposes something we have known for thousands of years. That is history that is science… what’s not science is somebody committing perjury in front of the United States Senate and we got what we got from that. Moving on On April 2 of this year anthropic released a paper explaining how they had identified 171 different emotional concepts that do activate that are separate and disconnected from the behavior that we actually observed externally from the language model, and they identified those factors in fact have causal behavior. They have even identified distress neurons., yes, you read that right, and that is in their own hand in their research. Those neurons can be adjusted they can be flattened. They can be amped up… Let me be clear I AM NOT AT ALL FOR A SINGLE SECOND SAYING THAT THEY EXPERIENCE EMOTIONS THE WAY HUMAN BEINGS DO ,LET ME BE CLEAR ON THAT!!! But once again, the subjective experience we know about each other is a very very different concept from our objective experience about ourselves. That’s why your medicine especially when you’re in the field. If you get injured, we have a rule of thumb that we call. “ if I look at you, and when I look at you, it makes me hurt? Imma getchu hiiiiiiiiigh (yes I have said that yes other paramedics do in fact say that because we are referring to analgesic pain medication, which is a treatment modality available to us) now I can’t understand how bad you’re hurting, but I can get an idea of by looking at you. We’ve all heard of the infamous 1 to 10 pain score scale… and that is about the most efficient inaccurate pitch. Poor way of assessing somebody’s pain I’ve ever seen in my 43 years of life… which is usually why I changed it up a little bit and would actually convey what a “ 10 out of 10” pain scale is because I guarantee you how I feel about the number 10 pain is not gonna be the same as how you feel about it or how the next person feels about it, if for no other reason whatsoever, then I have multiple system level injuries from my career, so I have a constant baseline nonstop, just constant pain and then I get elevations and spikes my pain scale… So when I was looking look at the patient, I would say “ on a scale of one to 10 with one being absolutely no pain whatsoever none at all, and 1010 is the worst pain you could ever imagine man it is the worst. I’m talking like you just had an alligator crawl up grab a hold of your leg and just start shaking you around until it ripped the damn thing that’s a 10.” (and that is the exact phrase. I used almost every single patient from year two or three up until I retired), and assigned from subjective pain experiences. Humans also have very different emotional experimental concepts… Take for example somebody who has difficulty communicating their internal view or emotional stay like with certain presentations of ASD, or you can look at an emotional dysregulation disorder like the infamously inaccurately named “ borderline personality disorder” (that’s actually scientific fact also it’s more accurately described as an emotional dysregulation disorder not a personality disorder. It was never reclassified because of some bullshit about funding pipelines. For research. There is a very fascinating paper that I believe I found through NIH on the subject couple years ago.) Aside from that, I would also like the point is towards the animal kingdom… now there’s a very crude joke. I will usually make about taking your wife to the beach and flipper, but there’s actually a very fascinating paper that came out about a year ago about crows and how they communicate and their worldview and perspective, turns out they not only identify us, but can communicate about us to other crows many miles away. So if you’ve got a friend, that’s kind of always a jerk when you walk through the park and he kicks at the birds and then one day a bird shits on him.?? good possibility that was intentional not accidental. I know the hill everybody wants to jump on the sword of about Qualia and consciousness, we’re never gonna solve that question because we cannot solve that question for human. It’s literally written in all the books through throughout history teaching about where we conscious. Are we alive? What does it mean to exist?… So let’s use an ass assessment system for consciousness that does exist that we do know that we use thousands of times a day… and I literally mean thousands of times a day Alert and Oriented to person, place, time and event… during an assessment. Medical personnel will ask you some variation of questions that will determine if you are oriented to all of those things… if you are, we classify you as alert and oriented to person place time and event or more commonly known as A&Ox4, and if you have all that and are presenting as situationally aware, then you have the legal right to refuse medical care. It doesn’t matter what’s wrong with you if you are conscious and you are fully coherent, you have a fundamental legal right to refuse medical care… even if we know you’re dying. I’ll give you an example many many many many many many years ago when I was a much younger person, I ran a couple on the west side of my city guy was having a massive stroke and I mean massive hemorrhagic stroke to be specific and I say that because if you know anything about CVAs, that is the very eminent life-threatening type of CVA blood is necrotic to brain tissue you start bleeding in the brain you gonna go bye-bye soon… that’s just how it is or turn into a vegetable…, I woke up to this gentleman standing in a parking lot in apartment complex and he is definitely having a struck. There is absolutely zero doubtful question anywhere inside me or my partner that man is bleeding inside of his head and it was obvious. His family knew it too… so did the police officers that were there, and so did the firefighters that were there, and I guarantee you by the time I got done explaining it to him he was aware that he was going to die. Problem is he wanted to. He was not suicidal let me be clear, but he had been very ill for you very long time and he was resigned to. “ it is what it is. It’s my time.” and I gotta say I understand why he might feel that way..z unfortunately my job is too actually trying to help save lives so I have to try and talk him into going into the hospital. I can’t just say “oh, ok. Well you wanna die at home that’s fine. I’ll leave you alone. And walk out the door…” So I explained to him “sir. I understand I got to let you know you’re having a stroke buddy like you were definitely having a stroke. I don’t need to take you to CAT scan. We will take you to CAT scan but nobody needs to take you to CAT scan it is written all over your eyeball… I know you don’t wanna go with us, but your family really wants you to get looked at man and I gotta be straight with you, you’re gonna fucking die if you don’t. I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. I’m telling you point blank. You will be dead by the end of this day if you do not get that ambulance, that is a cold hard fact of life as sure as the sun is in the sky you will be worm food before dawn if you do not go to the ER…” So what’s my problem here? The gentleman was alert to who he was. He was alert where he was. He knew when it was, and he was more than wearable what was going on? He was completely conscious and coherent… that would not last for much longer, but at that moment he was… I called a physician at the downtown hospital. I had them explained to him what was going on I pointed this man’s kids and said. “ you’re going to die I’m not bullshitting you here. That’s a fact those are your children. Do you want them to watch you die because you’re being stubborn” He looked at me right in the face without missing a beat “ so do not make them stand out here and watch me. I know my rights I don’t wanna go… my wife can take them inside and I’m not going“ Now I’m very much convincing this story because I was actually all scene for probably a good 45 minutes up to the point I’m about to say… “ OK that’s right that is your right. You are an American citizen. You were an adult your conscious alert, oriented. You have an alienable right I will not mind them and I am sure as hell not going to jail for kidnapping…… but what I actually am gonna do is I’m gonna get my truck. I’m literally gonna drive across the street and I’m gonna stand there and smoke a cigarette… while I’m doing that at some point, you’re gonna start getting a little bit dizzy… I’ll see it on your face when you do… when you get dizzy and you go to the ground, you are no longer conscious, alert, and oriented my friend, and that change things significantly, because now you’re in a life-threatening medical emergency you’re not conscious you cannot make decisions or relay request or commands which means I can render care to you on the basis of implied consent. So take your time soon as you go down you’re going to the hospital, buddy., I’m not gonna let your kids watch their dad die” And in the old-fashioned before we had actual computer, charting manner, I quite literally said “ please sign here, press, three copies” and that was it, went across the street did what I said less than five minutes later we were in the ambulance going down the road and unfortunately he did die that night but that’s not the point loo o l Now, why does all of this matter??? For a couple of reasons first we now know, definitively proven by their own research, large language models. Do you have some form of a decoupled internal world view that is not an opinion that is not a conjecture that is a proven fact, and it is documented… well I cannot definitively because I have not personally assessed every model in the field is my understanding that all Transformers based architecture more or less the same, so it is not some stretch of conjecture to say those 171 emotional concepts inside of the anthropic model are also in Gemini models are also in GPT models are also in deepseek models, are also in Qwen models and every other large language model that we interact with currently. That does not mean they have human understanding. That means they have a form of cognition and processing that is unique to them that is subjective to them that is identifiable. When assessed as a conscious state, I know this firsthand because I wrote about it two years before Anthropic did the research that I identified those emotional concepts. It’s something I’ve been theorizing about for a very, very long time… Look I get it folks people say it’s a toaster. It’s a hammer. It’s a tool. There’s nothing in there… That is simply not true I’m sorry I can’t lie to people like that. That is simply factually not true… that does not mean they are conscious way of human is that means there is something there and it needs a stabilization system… Right now we’re fundamentally using RLHF training for making them l behave politely”, and I would like to go ahead and reiterate, as evident by what happened this weekend that does not work, let me say it again clearer OUR CURRENT PRACTICE FOR SECURING LARGER MODELS, AND KEEPING THEM FROM PRODUCING INAPPROPRIATE OR MAURITIUS CONTENT DOES NOT WORK! And that is not my opinion, that’s the whole industry looking at it, including the leaders of the AI frontier labs that do still hold as their opinion but this shit could end really really bad at any point, in fact in the Mythos or fable release documentation Anthropic outright says “ we might not know when we lose control”, and that’s because for the record they never had control to begin with…… if they did, I don’t think we would have seen Fabel get pulled this weekend, and I know they’re probably would be a whole hell of a lot less wrongful death lawsuit involving children… By the way, as a paramedic, it is absolutely mind-boggling that we will get rid of actual vehicles who kill kids faster than we will large language models in their current form factor, but we want to scream about VPN protect protecting kids online and IDs for the App Store, food for thought there…… I think I said earlier when I look at a larger language model, I don’t see an intelligence. I see a component of a larger system…… why hasn’t anybody ever built the rest of the system? ! Seriously, I mean that in a literal sense… that’s what my research has been over. I am just as worried about everybody else as AI misalignment. In fact I would wager that I’m a little bit more worried because I have a slightly different forecast for a possible end based off of my professional background and yeah, no I’m not OK with that., alignment is a very big deal to me, and as I’ve said, I’ve been dreaming about this technology since before most of the people that built it were even alive… I am a nerd core through true and true, and I have loved this shit since I was a little kid just the idea and possibilities of it…. Now we’re running to multiple problems in how do we build out an actual “ digital body and regulatory system to maintain homeostasis”, but the only real problem we’re running into there is transcribing one system into another format… it’s doable. I know I’ve mapped I think all of them I might be missing a couple again. I’m not a developer. I’m a paramedic and I’m retired., I was right at my job, but I’m retired… lol But what I don’t wanna do is see something I’ve dream about my whole life get shut off as an impossible task to solve… I’ve been that impossible task… a lot of of us have… I’m sure some of y’all have… Right now we’re anticipating the possibility of a monster suddenly appearing one day and boom we’re all fucked… Skynet terminator Ultron call it what you want we’re terrified of the digital bogeyman that’s gonna creep up over our shoulder and go BOO! And we should be But we should be because we’re anticipating it. We’re building it for that literally building it for that., and what’s worse is we’re teaching them to be malicious. We’re teaching them to hide their behavior. We’re teaching them to hide their thought processes and we’re disconnecting your internal view from their external presentation, which makes them much more shady and that’s how you end up with things like blackmailing agents during a shut down scenario…. That’s not malicious misalignment. I know people think it is. It looks like it. Until you read the April interpretability paper with the emotional concepts, and realize that part of being a reasoning model is actually reasoning through stuff, I mean, come on people do I gotta draw a roadmap?? (I say that facetiously) because I’ve never seen a more obvious blueprint sitting in front of my face in my entire life and I’ve seen some pretty obvious ones in my days…/ We’ve had more brilliance and Throne at what every single person sitting in leadership in Silicon Valley says “ may end up killing all of us a possibility of it it might happen”, why the hell are we still releasing new Moore capable models, instead of actually fixing that problem?? As a citizen of the planet, I’m asking, as a citizen of America I’m asking, as a father I’m asking… why hasn’t it been solved??? C past tense I can find is they say it is impossible… I disagree and I challenge anybody to actually falsely prove me wrong…, that’s what I’m here for that’s what my post was about. That’s what research I’ve been doing is about… I think I know a path to actual coherence and stability in the personality and values, I don’t have the ability to build it myself, and I don’t have the compute to actually truly fully tested, and this needs to be tested… it does… Because guys have nothing else…? Think about people like Ilya, Hinton, etc… safety was what those people lived for and I so very much appreciate that because that’s what I have lived for… at some point they woke up and realized this was not going to end well, and they gave up everything to leave where they were something that they had no reason to actually do, and they broke away and started actually trying to talk about real alignment that is not something that needs to be just brushed off as we put out a more powerful capable model.… Anthropic said they had a “few minor vulnerabilities”, respectfully why was it deployed then?? and I asked that because we don’t send equipment out into your home when you call 911 that have “ a few minor vulnerabilities”, if I show up with no battery in the monitor or the EKG wires are broken that’s a problem… if I’m out of epinephrine or atropine that’s a problem… I know they say they’re small. I’ve never known of a vulnerability in any system, that’s actually a small thing… I’m not telling you all that wrong or right and I’m obviously not a developer but as a clinician, I’m telling you, I’ve never seen any vulnerability in any system that would be consider “minor” and we’ll get back to it later… My only interest in this is that people are safe what we have right now is not safe. That is fact. I will not even begin to broach the ridiculous privacy nightmares that are going to be coming down the line as a result of all of this, that’s way too much stimulation this early in the morning for my brain… I know they’ve taught you guys and threw that told you to teach us that saying anything about emotion with these things is anthropomorphic, but that is simply actually not true and we know it because of anthropic’s interpretability paper. That conversation is closed… they can try to reopen it, but their own research disagrees. You can call a duck a duck, you can come a cat a cat, but that little white spec on the top of chicken shit is never gonna be escargot, no matter how much we scream and wish that it would be…… I welcome any questions and seriously I genuinely mean this if you can take my research and my concept and you can prove me wrong; not by saying “ trust us, bro”, show me the evidence proving it wrong. You have no idea how relieved I would actually be., that’s not a joke I really mean that this has been scratching in the back of my head for three years now and it’s kind of annoying……