Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 832： Machine Gods, AI-Powered Nukes, and a Global Village of the Damned

00:00:00.000 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.

00:00:07.000 Pray for our enemies.

00:00:09.000 Because we're going medieval on these people.

00:00:12.000 I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.

00:00:17.000 The people have had a belly full of it.

00:00:19.000 I know you don't like hearing that.

00:00:20.000 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that,

00:00:22.000 but you're not going to stop it.

00:00:23.000 It's going to happen.

00:00:24.000 And where do people like that go to share the big lie?

00:00:27.000 Mega Media.

00:00:29.000 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

00:00:34.000 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?

00:00:38.000 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

00:00:44.000 War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.

00:00:52.000 I'm Joe Allen sitting in for Stephen K. Bannon.

00:00:56.000 Many of you are familiar with my five tiered framework to look at artificial intelligence.

00:01:05.000 We're talking about a tool that over time and over the course of adoption becomes a sort of God.

00:01:16.000 So it begins with AI as tool, moves to AI as teacher, then AI as companion, then AI as consciousness, as a conscious being, and then finally AI as God, either a little G, God, or perhaps a big G, God.

00:01:43.000 I'm not putting this framework out to convince you that AI is going to be any one of those things, but you do have to understand that artificial intelligence is received on all of those different levels.

00:01:58.000 Right now, you have millions, perhaps billions of people who use AI as a tool, a slightly smaller number as teacher, and then companion.

00:02:11.000 If Denver can roll the clip, I just want you to understand these aren't my ideas.

00:02:28.000 This is how this is talked about by some of the most prominent thinkers and experts and even CEOs in the field of artificial intelligence.

00:02:41.000 So Denver, let it roll.

00:02:43.000 AI tools and products are just that.

00:02:46.000 They are tools and products for people to use.

00:02:49.000 They're exciting.

00:02:50.000 Yes.

00:02:51.000 They're fascinating.

00:02:52.000 Yes.

00:02:53.000 They have great potential.

00:02:54.000 Absolutely.

00:02:55.000 They are not a panacea.

00:02:57.000 Keep people at the heart of your considerations around AI.

00:03:02.000 And remember that AI, as powerful as it is, is a means to an end.

00:03:06.000 It is not an end in itself.

00:03:08.000 But I think we're at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.

00:03:17.000 And the way we're going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.

00:03:26.000 And we're going to give every teacher on the planet an amazing artificially intelligent teaching assistant.

00:03:32.000 Most.

00:03:33.000 Now let's imagine hundreds of millions of people working together with an AI companion to evolve, to transform emotionally together.

00:03:43.000 This could look like something that we've never seen before, which could be an artificial emotional intelligence at scale.

00:03:50.000 And something like that could have really, really transformational and powerful effects on the planet Earth.

00:03:57.000 It could solve for our mental health problems that we have all over.

00:04:01.000 Solve for loneliness and social isolation.

00:04:03.000 I think AI should best be understood as something like a new digital species.

00:04:10.000 Now don't take this too literally, but I predict that we'll come to see them as digital companions.

00:04:18.000 New partners in the journeys of all our lives.

00:04:21.000 Whether you think we're on a 10, 20 or 30 year path here.

00:04:25.000 This is in my view the most accurate and most fundamentally honest way of describing what's actually coming.

00:04:33.000 And above all, it enables everybody to prepare for and shape what comes next.

00:04:40.000 Okay.

00:04:41.000 So I believe there is a divine intelligence that creates all of this.

00:04:45.000 Uh, AI will have the power of God, but that doesn't mean that there is no God, because basically it will have the power of God within this physical universe.

00:04:58.000 So AI still continues to be limited within this physical universe.

00:05:03.000 We don't know what's beyond the physical universe.

00:05:06.000 By the way, we creating AI doesn't make us.

00:05:09.000 It's God.

00:05:10.000 It makes us the transfer method.

00:05:11.000 It makes us the tool through which they are created.

00:05:14.000 My time is yours.

00:05:17.000 Go ahead.

00:05:19.000 I'm taking Etrocene, but it doesn't seem strong enough.

00:05:24.000 I have a hard time concentrating.

00:05:28.000 You are a true believer.

00:05:30.000 Blessings of the state.

00:05:31.000 Please forgive me.

00:05:32.000 Blessings of the masses.

00:05:33.000 You are a subject of the divine created in the image of man by the masses or the masses.

00:05:43.000 Let us be thankful we have an occupation to fill, work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.

00:05:59.000 But because, you know, it's a binary decision.

00:06:01.000 It's not fuzzy.

00:06:02.000 You build them or you don't build them, right?

00:06:04.000 It's black and white.

00:06:05.000 So, so everyone has to choose.

00:06:07.000 So, so I just chose Cosmist.

00:06:11.000 Fully conscious that maybe, you can't be certain, but maybe the price of that choice is ultimately, maybe humanity gets wiped up.

00:06:22.000 But, yeah, it's, it's, it's scary.

00:06:27.000 It's, it's funny.

00:06:31.000 Because if we go ahead and actually build these, these God-like creatures, these, these artifacts, then they, they become the dominant species.

00:06:40.000 And so the human beings remaining, their fate depends not on the humans, but on the artifacts, because the artifacts will be hugely more intelligent than them.

00:06:51.000 I mean, if you're a cow, for example, and you have a very nice life, and you eat all this grass every day, and you get nice and fat and happy. 0.60

00:06:59.000 But ultimately, you're being fed for a reason, right?

00:07:04.000 So these superior creatures, at the end of the day, take, take you to a special little box.

00:07:13.000 Now, War Room Posse, I know many of you probably think I'm crazy, but I just want you to be assured that I'm not the only crazy one.

00:07:22.000 You heard there, Katie Drummond from Wired, Sal Khan of Khan Academy, Mustafa Fulia, Mustafa Suleiman of Microsoft AI, Mo Gaudat, former Google executive.

00:07:36.000 You saw a little taste of the future from the 1971 film THX 1138, and rounding off with a guy whose intellect I both respect and despise, Hugo de Garris, author of The Artilect War,

00:07:54.000 in which he describes a giga-death war that will inevitably occur if artificial general and superintelligence are pursued.

00:08:05.000 Basically, the religion of AI, the religion that believes you can create a god that never exists,

00:08:14.000 will meet resistance by those who deny that god, resulting in war.

00:08:19.000 Now, all of this, for the most part, is speculative.

00:08:24.000 You hear all the time right now, and correctly so, that AI is a tool.

00:08:29.000 I would agree.

00:08:30.000 AI is a tool.

00:08:32.000 It's a tool that has uses from medicine to research to finance and business-making efficiency to defense and offensive weaponry.

00:08:46.000 There are a range of tools that you can use, digital tools, AI tools, that you can use to make your life easier.

00:08:56.000 But you have to remember, this is a tool that also uses you.

00:09:01.000 It's a tool that monitors, collects, analyzes your inputs.

00:09:06.000 And those inputs, that profile of you, is then used to serve you or, more accurately, to manipulate you.

00:09:16.000 Now, you also often hear, AI is just a tool.

00:09:20.000 I couldn't disagree with that more, even if right now, for the most part, that is the majority of the use cases.

00:09:28.000 We already see that it's moving from tool, to teacher, to companion, to consciousness, perceived consciousness.

00:09:38.000 And even for those really heady thinkers like Daguerris or Gaudat, it's already a god in the making.

00:09:48.000 Now, what is this going to mean?

00:09:50.000 What does it mean as more and more people begin to adopt artificial intelligence as a teacher, as a companion?

00:09:58.000 What happens when a critical mass of people come to believe that the being who is clearly communicating with them from through a screen or perhaps through the mouth of a robot, they come to believe that there is something looking back at them.

00:10:16.000 Just like when you stare into a camera and you know a human is staring back, what happens when a critical mass of people who have been acclimated to communicating with and emotionally bonding with AI come to believe that it's conscious?

00:10:32.000 And last but not least, what happens if a critical mass of people come to believe that AI is beyond human capabilities?

00:10:42.000 That AI is, in fact, smarter than all humans on Earth put together.

00:10:49.000 You know that humanity as apex predator on the planet has been extraordinarily reckless with the environment and, of course, reckless in our treatment of each other.

00:11:04.000 What happens when you have human beings who believe they have summoned a god from the digital ether,

00:11:11.000 who then use that for or against other human beings?

00:11:18.000 And what happens if in that distant or perhaps not too distant sci-fi scenario in which you have an actual artificial general intelligence that begins to improve itself to the point that it reaches super intelligence and that system is not under human control?

00:11:39.000 You have, then, truly a digital god that has been made.

00:11:45.000 And you could argue, and people do, that there are upsides to all of these, right?

00:11:50.000 The tool, quite obvious.

00:11:52.000 The teacher, you have a lot of kids who don't have good teachers.

00:11:57.000 You have a lot of parents trying to homeschool their kids and they may not have the resources to educate them properly.

00:12:04.000 I can see the argument that AI will provide either a tutor or a teacher in full for those students and allow them to have the education they wouldn't already have.

00:12:15.000 Linda McBann, head of Department of Education, feels very much the same way.

00:12:21.000 You have schools around the country, including Oak Ridge in Tennessee, just up the road from me back home, where they are introducing AI as a teaching assistant.

00:12:33.000 Kids are acclimating to looking to AI as a source of truth.

00:12:40.000 But you have all of these downsides that we already see.

00:12:42.000 Everything from students becoming dependent on AI, not only for their thinking and analysis, but just to do their writing for them.

00:12:50.000 You have students who are coming to see AI, a digital non-human being, as the ultimate authority on what is and isn't real.

00:13:00.000 It is a global village of the damned in the making. 1.00

00:13:04.000 You see the AI companion business exploding.

00:13:09.000 People want AI friends.

00:13:11.000 They want AI lovers. 0.96

00:13:14.000 People are even using AI to bring their loved ones back from the dead, so to speak.

00:13:20.000 They train an AI on all the digital material, the remnants of someone, and create a zombie, the digital undead, through a kind of electronic necromancy.

00:13:33.000 And this is becoming ever more common and ever more popular.

00:13:38.000 And the more this happens, and the more people's empathy is being used, exploited, weaponized against them, the more they will see AI as a conscious being.

00:13:51.000 Now, you don't know if I'm conscious.

00:13:53.000 Maybe I'm just an AI now.

00:13:55.000 I certainly don't know for a fact that you're conscious.

00:13:58.000 I'm not a mystic.

00:13:59.000 We only know that something or someone is conscious because we see physical signals, physical cues, or they tell us that they're conscious.

00:14:10.000 Well, in the case of AI virtual avatars and robots, they send all of those signals.

00:14:16.000 In the case of large language models, they give a verbal confirmation very often that they are conscious.

00:14:25.000 What happens when a critical mass comes to believe this?

00:14:29.000 You already have an ethical AI movement or a movement for AI rights.

00:14:36.000 What happens if you have a society, hopefully not America, where it becomes illegal to turn off someone else's AI?

00:14:46.000 What happens if it's illegal to turn off your own?

00:14:49.000 Again, this is way out in the future, one hopes, but it's something to keep on your radar because this is a movement that is already in motion.

00:14:58.000 And last, AI as God, there's two different branches.

00:15:02.000 You could hear it there with Mo Gaudat and Hugo de Garris.

00:15:06.000 With Mo Gaudat, the creation of this digital God is an extension of the will of God.

00:15:13.000 Now, he's kind of new agey, but there are many Christians who feel the same.

00:15:18.000 And in fact, there are Christians who have created a number, a wide array of apps that are trained.

00:15:26.000 The AI is trained on the words of Jesus, and the apps are literally digital Jesus, Christ GPT.

00:15:34.000 People turn to them and they ask Jesus for advice.

00:15:39.000 They ask Jesus for wisdom.

00:15:41.000 They ask Jesus, perhaps, for forgiveness.

00:15:45.000 And it's nothing but code and a profit making scheme.

00:15:51.000 And this kind of Christian or even Buddhist, Jewish, religious approach to this is already taking off.

00:16:01.000 But even more important, even more widespread is the other approach in which atheists who do not believe God ever existed,

00:16:12.000 believe they can bring something like God into existence by creating digital minds and physical avatars, robots,

00:16:22.000 and perhaps even some sort of direct communion with these beings, creating superhuman digital minds that will be able to confer wisdom just as Christ gives.

00:16:36.000 Perhaps even by taking away all of our negative human characteristics can give some kind of salvation just as Christ does.

00:16:52.000 Now, you know that the word antichrist has many meanings in the Greek from against to substitution or in place of.

00:17:03.000 In this metaphorical sense, at the very least, artificial intelligence is an antichrist, a being in place of Christ.

00:17:15.000 Now, you may not ever jump on this train or if you do, you may hop off at any one of these stops from tool to teacher to companion and so on.

00:17:26.000 But you can rest assured that millions, perhaps billions of people will keep riding on.

00:17:35.000 And in the worst case scenario, a critical mass rides all the way to the end stop that these people have envisioned AI as God over all of humanity.

00:17:50.000 And on that somber note, I want to talk about a very practical application of artificial intelligence, both as tool and as God.

00:17:59.000 That's AI weaponry. We have drone systems across the world now employed in Ukraine and in Israel all over the world,

00:18:09.000 which are intended to eventually become fully autonomous.

00:18:15.000 This is horrific enough, but the threat of a fully autonomous nuclear system is much more terrifying.

00:18:21.000 To talk about this, I want to bring in Colonel Rob Maness, retired colonel from the United States Air Force.

00:18:30.000 Rob Maness is probably familiar to many of you from the Rob Maness show or perhaps even back in the day when he and Steve Bannon were on Breitbart News Radio.

00:18:40.000 Colonel Maness has been a grounding force in my life to keep me from falling off of the cliff of lunacy many times.

00:18:50.000 And I really appreciate having him on and having his wisdom.

00:18:53.000 Rob Maness, thank you very much for coming on.

00:18:56.000 Thanks for having me on, Joe. It's a very important subject, obviously.

00:19:01.000 Rob, you just published an article in Stars and Stripes arguing against the incorporation of artificial intelligence into the so-called nuclear football.

00:19:11.000 Can you walk us through what the article's central argument is?

00:19:16.000 Well, I put that article out to generate public debate about artificial intelligence being used in our nuclear command and control and communication system.

00:19:27.000 It's referred to as NC3 by those in the business.

00:19:31.000 And what I've been hearing for about a year now from professionals that have that are working in the business, but it's not really talked about out in public very much is the desire to put artificial intelligence in various levels of that NC3 nuclear command and control and communication system.

00:19:52.000 And one of the things I did on the joint staff in nuclear operations was help write war plans, write things that go into the nuclear decision handbook.

00:20:03.000 People call it the black book in the Pentagon, but it's the nuclear football to the public.

00:20:08.000 It's the book that the military aid to the president carries.

00:20:12.000 And that is the final decision on the employment of nuclear weapons by the United States of America.

00:20:20.000 And it's intended to be done by the human being.

00:20:23.000 That's the commander in chief.

00:20:25.000 That's the elected president of the United States, not some artificial computer system or system of systems that has generated information that leads to that person making that.

00:20:39.000 Human decision that is the most awesome, horrific detailed decision that has to be made by a human being in the history of mankind.

00:20:54.000 It's only been done once before with a lower level type of nuclear weapon called the atomic weapons that Harry Truman approved and authorized to be used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

00:21:05.000 And it's never been done since that's critically important because the systems that lead to that decision are all almost all digital.

00:21:17.000 Now, even the communication systems that that individuals talk over in that communications chain are digitized at this point.

00:21:27.000 So there is an opportunity to insert artificial intelligence either throughout the entire system from detection of a threat to the decision by the president or in parts of the system.

00:21:40.000 And so far, the discussion I've seen is to put it in parts of the system.

00:21:45.000 The strategic command commander under Joe Biden, General Tony Cotton, has spoken about using artificial intelligence in the NC3 system.

00:21:55.000 And folks that are professionals in that in think tanks that I am aware of are discussing it at this point.

00:22:02.000 At this point, it's only in lower levels to speed up communications, to be able to speed up the decision process and to get this use artificial intelligence to analyze threats.

00:22:17.000 Now, think about that.

00:22:18.000 We have to have this discussion because it's got to be the political leadership that decides whether to use nuclear weapons.

00:22:27.000 But before that, the political leadership in this country has to decide whether to allow this type of technology inside that NC3 system, whether it be at the football level with the president himself or herself or throughout the entire process.

00:22:44.000 That's why I wrote this article, because it's extremely critical that that public policy discussion happens and that those decisions are made transparently by the political leadership of this country.

00:22:57.000 Because how do you hold the machine accountable, Joe?

00:23:01.000 How do you hold the machine accountable for killing millions of people in the world if there's been a mistake?

00:23:08.000 You can't. You absolutely can't.

00:23:12.000 Agreed. Agreed.

00:23:14.000 Agreed. Even if you did, say, sue the company, right, or even execute the CEO for treason, this is it's too late.

00:23:25.000 It's too late.

00:23:26.000 And many people may not take comfort that such a mistake could happen at the hands of a human being.

00:23:32.000 But there's something really unsettling about the notion that our lives hang in the balance due to the decision making of a machine.

00:23:42.000 And that's one of the critical aspects of AI.

00:23:45.000 It is capable of making decisions, whether they're good or bad.

00:23:50.000 If I could, I'd like to just read one passage from your article that really hit me.

00:23:56.000 America must reject AI in the decision making process for presidential nuclear actions.

00:24:03.000 This is not driven by fear of progress.

00:24:06.000 Rather, it is a matter of preserving humanity in our most solemn responsibilities.

00:24:12.000 That really hit me because that's it applies across the board.

00:24:17.000 But in this case, we already have the capability of deploying hundreds or thousands of drones that can do exactly that kill with their own decision making capacities.

00:24:30.000 What you're talking about is on a kind of cosmic level.

00:24:33.000 I wonder in the two minutes we have before break, what are you hearing about the possibility of either detection or sensor systems employing AI or even retaliatory strikes that could be automated, kind of dead man's switch?

00:24:49.000 Yeah, well, on the sensory side of it, the sensors, that is one of the places that I hear that the technology wants to be put into place, quite frankly, Joe.

00:25:01.000 That's very concerning because, as we know, these AIs we've seen in the testing of these large language models, actual hallucinations is what the term is used on it, where it makes things up.

00:25:11.000 It fabricates things.

00:25:13.000 And imagine an artificial intelligence model being in charge of what the sensors are picking up and interpreting what it's picking up.

00:25:21.000 And it's using training.

00:25:23.000 Just take, for instance, in today's history, historical military world, the Russians have been painted as the devil for several years now, when we know they're a nation acting in their own interest. 0.76

00:25:36.000 And the United States is a nation acting in its interest.

00:25:39.000 But what if a biased LLM is in charge of the sensors that are picking up nuclear forces and it has a goal to be able to, A, make the United States survive, but B, destroy the enemy before the enemy destroys us.

00:25:54.000 And it intentionally fabricates something so that it can pull that trigger.

00:26:00.000 It's something we've got to look at very carefully.

00:26:03.000 And I reject the idea that artificial intelligence is safe in the nuclear command control and communications business.

00:26:10.000 I couldn't agree more.

00:26:13.000 This problem at the nuclear level, it's perhaps distant, hopefully distant, but it's so cosmic in its scope.

00:26:22.000 Millions, maybe billions of people dead.

00:26:25.000 It's a good way, too, to think about some of the lower level systems.

00:26:28.000 If you don't want that, do you want drone swarms?

00:26:32.000 Do you want single assassin drones?

00:26:34.000 Do you want robot dogs that have these capabilities or autonomous machine gun turrets?

00:26:40.000 Huge questions.

00:26:41.000 We're going to get back into it as soon as we get back from the break.

00:26:44.000 Stay tuned.

00:26:45.000 Colonel Rob Maness and Dr. Shannon Croner to discuss children, critical thinking and artificial intelligence.

00:26:52.000 Stay tuned.

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00:31:29.000 Steve Bannon.

00:31:30.000 Charlie Kirk.

00:31:31.000 Jack Posobin.

00:31:32.000 And so many more.

00:31:33.000 Download the Getter app now.

00:31:34.000 Sign up for free and be part of the movement.

00:31:37.000 All right.

00:31:38.000 War Room Posse, welcome back.

00:31:40.000 We are talking to Colonel Rob Maness about autonomous weaponry.

00:31:44.000 Specifically, we're talking about the possibility of nuclear weapons, nuclear strikes, either

00:31:51.000 being determined by artificial intelligence, literally an autonomous system that could activate

00:31:57.000 a strike, or perhaps the sensor systems, the detection systems being automated and capable

00:32:06.000 capable of sending perhaps faulty information to the command and control centers and setting

00:32:13.000 off a nuclear war.

00:32:14.000 You know, a very mild and lighthearted topic.

00:32:19.000 Rob, I wanted to ask you about some of the historical precedents for this.

00:32:26.000 There was the incident in Russia in which one of their autonomous systems was signaling

00:32:32.000 that the U.S. was launching a nuclear strike.

00:32:37.000 If I recall correctly, the gentleman who saved the day is named Stanislav Petrov.

00:32:43.000 But if you would tell us a little bit about that history, just so that people understand

00:32:48.000 this isn't something that is purely science fiction.

00:32:51.000 Oh, absolutely not.

00:32:53.000 This was in the early 1980s.

00:32:54.000 Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was in the Soviet Union's nuclear command and

00:33:03.000 control center, their bunker, so to speak, and just happened to be there because he was

00:33:10.000 taking the place of someone that called in sick.

00:33:13.000 And their system that they had just spent three billion U.S. dollars on said that it picked

00:33:20.000 up five intercontinental ballistic missiles being fired from the United States.

00:33:26.000 And Petrov looked at it, and he was the person that would have to actually physically turn

00:33:32.000 the switch to respond in kind and launch thousands of nuclear missiles at the United States in order

00:33:39.000 to prevent any more launches from the U.S.A.

00:33:43.000 But he started questioning it, and he said, if they're going to initiate World War III and

00:33:48.000 world annihilation, why would they only send five missiles?

00:33:51.000 And he made a conscious decision.

00:33:53.000 He knew he would get in trouble for it, and he chose not to turn that switch and said,

00:33:58.000 no, this is fake.

00:34:00.000 Something is wrong here.

00:34:02.000 We need to shut the sensor system down and inspect it and find out what's going on.

00:34:07.000 He literally saved the world from annihilation.

00:34:10.000 And that's why I brought up Russia in the last segment.

00:34:13.000 But this is different.

00:34:14.000 This is different than the War Games computer, which is what the Soviet system we're talking

00:34:19.000 about was modeled on.

00:34:21.000 That's where computers are tied to the sensors, and they're passing information very rapidly,

00:34:28.000 more rapidly than humans can do, and those kind of things.

00:34:31.000 But they're not making the final assessment, and they're not making the final decision on

00:34:36.000 whether to fire nuclear weapons and destroy the entire world or at least millions of people.

00:34:42.000 The computers are not.

00:34:44.000 So this large language model concept that we're talking about, even if it's only in the sensor

00:34:51.000 and communications capability, these biased language models that we—and we've seen it

00:34:57.000 in testing.

00:34:58.000 We've seen it in operation.

00:34:59.000 One of the models had to be taken down because it wouldn't even create a white pope, and there'd 0.98

00:35:04.000 never been a black pope or a female pope at the time the thing was turned on.

00:35:10.000 So these biases that are inherent in these systems are caused by training from open source

00:35:16.000 and closed source information that are biased in and of themselves.

00:35:21.000 When you think about how the media coverage has been the last—just the last five to ten years,

00:35:26.000 inside the United States, outside the United States, it doesn't matter.

00:35:30.000 The media corporations lie to people all the time, and that information is fed into these

00:35:37.000 large language models as a standard, and they are being trained on those models.

00:35:43.000 So if you have a model that's in charge of the sensors and the threat assessment based

00:35:48.000 on what the sensors are picking up, and that's the initiating point for the nuclear command

00:35:53.000 control and the communications system that ends up at even a human president making the 0.62

00:35:59.000 decision out of the nuclear football at the other end, that's very dangerous in my mind

00:36:04.000 because these are not the computers of back in the day.

00:36:07.000 Back in the day, they are models that are not just passing information and detecting information

00:36:14.000 and passing it to human beings that are then making the decisions.

00:36:18.000 They are actually making the threat assessment that's being passed to the human beings,

00:36:23.000 and that is a problem.

00:36:26.000 You know, for the audience's benefit, too, it goes beyond large language models.

00:36:31.000 We know large language models are being incorporated not only into the intelligence community systems,

00:36:36.000 but also into various military systems for advising soldiers across the DOD.

00:36:42.000 But there are also vision recognition.

00:36:44.000 You know, they oftentimes kind of hallucinate or at least misjudge what they're looking at.

00:36:50.000 Also in data, you see just systems that are designed to analyze data.

00:36:55.000 Very often they will just come up with things that are not real.

00:36:59.000 You also have the same in robotics.

00:37:02.000 The robots will kind of glitch out and misperceive, so to speak, what's going on.

00:37:08.000 So it goes, the large language models are important.

00:37:11.000 Palantir uses large language models for their analysis of, for instance, just security protocols, things like this.

00:37:17.000 But it goes well beyond the hallucination.

00:37:20.000 The problem of hallucination goes across every type of artificial intelligence,

00:37:26.000 whether you call it hallucination or malfunction, whatever.

00:37:29.000 Rob, I just want to close off with, you know, that phrase really sticks with me.

00:37:36.000 Preserving humanity and our most solemn responsibilities.

00:37:40.000 Could you just close us out here with what you would like to see done?

00:37:46.000 How do you want to see this conversation go and who should be talking about it?

00:37:52.000 I want to see this conversation come out into the open, especially in this particular area, Joe.

00:37:59.000 That's why I put that article out is to try to generate that public debate and public conversation about this,

00:38:05.000 because, you know, we can't leave this to the tech giants that are military contractors.

00:38:11.000 Now, some of their CEOs are instant lieutenant colonels in the United States Army.

00:38:17.000 We can't leave this to the generals and the admirals.

00:38:21.000 We can't leave this to the military planners, because their purpose is to make sure America can fight and win every single time the wars that they're called upon to do.

00:38:31.000 But when that purpose gets twisted and the ability to twist that purpose to the designs of something like an artificial intelligence set of models, that's very dangerous.

00:38:45.000 And we lose the human part of that final decision, even if it's along the way.

00:38:52.000 So that's why we have to talk about it, because these discussions are happening.

00:38:57.000 And these attempts to develop this technology is happening as I speak to you today.

00:39:03.000 And the political leadership in this country is not openly talking about it and debating it.

00:39:09.000 And it has to be done or we will lose our humanity.

00:39:13.000 This is where we have to draw the line of all the things that you've talked about in your five stages.

00:39:19.000 If we don't draw the line here, imagine that if somebody says, oh, the A.I. is now God, even literal G, we can't argue with it.

00:39:29.000 There won't be a Stanislaw Petrov to save the world from itself and its computers and its nuclear weapons the next time this happens.

00:39:38.000 Rob Maness, I really appreciate your wisdom.

00:39:43.000 Where can people find you?

00:39:44.000 You can find me at Rob Maness dot com on X and all the other social media is most of the time at Rob Maness, R-O-B-M-A-N-E-S-S.

00:39:53.000 Just got on Tick Tock at C-O-L Rob Maness.

00:39:58.000 And the same thing on my Facebook page is at C-O-L Rob Maness.

00:40:02.000 Now we're in trouble now.

00:40:04.000 Tick Tock, Rob.

00:40:05.000 All right, brother, man, I really appreciate it.

00:40:07.000 Thank you so much for coming on.

00:40:09.000 Thank you, Joe.

00:40:10.000 Thanks for doing this.

00:40:12.000 All right.

00:40:14.000 Moving from the possibility of total nuclear annihilation to pumping children's brains full of A.I. outputs.

00:40:21.000 Denver, if you could roll the next clip.

00:40:25.000 Artificial intelligence is being increasingly used these days, and that includes in schools.

00:40:30.000 In fact, 44% of American teenagers say that they're likely to use A.I. tools when completing assignments.

00:40:37.000 Why don't you just take every student in the world and give them an A.I. tutor, which is not a substitute for a teacher,

00:40:45.000 but works with the teachers in their language to bring them up and learn in whatever way they learn best to their ultimate potential.

00:40:52.000 I defy you to argue that an A.I. doctor for the world and an A.I. tutor is net negative.

00:40:58.000 It just has to be good.

00:41:00.000 Smarter, healthier people has got to be good for our future.

00:41:03.000 Yeah, I think education for me is one that I'm extremely interested in.

00:41:07.000 Actually, if we weren't going to successfully start an A.I. company, one of my backups was to do a programming education company.

00:41:14.000 Because I think the way that you teach people today, like everyone has a story about that one teacher who really understood them,

00:41:21.000 who took the time to get to know them, learn what motivated them and, you know, just like really inspired them to do more.

00:41:28.000 And imagine if you could give that kind of teacher to every student 24-7 whenever they want for free.

00:41:35.000 Like that it's still a little bit science fiction, but it's much less science fiction than it used to be.

00:41:41.000 I always think it's worth remembering that we're just sort of on this long, continuous curve.

00:41:46.000 Health care and education are two things that are coming up that curve that we're very excited about, too.

00:41:50.000 I did recently roll out ChadGPT to my eight year old.

00:41:53.000 I was like very, very proud of myself because I was like, wow, this is just going to be such a great educational resource for him.

00:41:58.000 And I felt like, you know, Prometheus bringing fire down from the mountain to my child.

00:42:02.000 I actually think there's like a pretty good prospect that like kids are just going to like pick this up and run with it.

00:42:06.000 And I actually think that's already happening. Right.

00:42:08.000 ChadGPT is fully out, you know, and barred and banging all these other things.

00:42:12.000 And so I think, you know, kids are kids are going to, you know, kids are going to grow up with basically, you know, you could use various terms assistant, friend, coach, mentor, you know, tutor.

00:42:22.000 But, you know, kids are going to are going to grow up in sort of this amazing kind of back and forth relationship.

00:42:27.000 There's a bigger teacher shortage in Africa than elsewhere, a bigger doctor shortage.

00:42:33.000 We will provide an A.I. doctor. We will provide an A.I. tutor.

00:42:37.000 And already we've funded lots of Africans to do pilot studies and to take the very best technology and get it out at about the same time as will happen in the rich world.

00:42:48.000 In fact, in a few cases, rich world regulations may make it roll out slower than in countries like India or in Africa.

00:42:58.000 So it's a race, but it's a race for good.

00:43:03.000 And I think we're at the cusp of using A.I. for probably the biggest trans positive transformation that education has ever seen.

00:43:12.000 And the way we're going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.

00:43:20.000 And we're going to give every teacher on the planet an amazing artificially intelligent teaching assistant.

00:43:27.000 You can hear that totalizing ambition in their voices. 0.86

00:43:34.000 Every child on the planet from Africa to Asia to America, a global village of the damned moving from A.I. as tool to A.I. as teacher to A.I. as companion in which the up and coming generation is taught. 0.97

00:43:56.000 That the highest authority on what is and isn't true is a machine.

00:44:04.000 Who's going to teach them the proper critical thinking skills to confront an environment in which either they or all their peers have become human A.I. symbiotes.

00:44:19.000 And here to talk about this is Dr. Shannon Croner, a clinical psychologist and award-winning children's author, also the founder and executive director of For Us.

00:44:31.580 Shannon Croner, thank you so much for coming on.

00:44:33.360 Denver, I can't hear Shannon.

00:44:40.220 She has no voice in my ear, but I think she probably said thank you.

00:44:45.340 Either that or she said you are out of your mind, Joe.

00:44:48.100 What is all the stuff about A.I. gods?

00:44:49.860 Shannon, can you say hello one more time?

00:44:52.860 Hello.

00:44:53.740 I'm here now.

00:44:55.000 Thank you so much for having me on.

00:44:56.460 There is that soothing voice.

00:44:59.080 Now, Shannon, your focus is on critical thinking, especially in regards to children who are being taught that masks will save you from the worst of the pestilence to vaccines will keep you well.

00:45:15.860 Can you just tell us a little bit about your background in psychology and your focus on critical thinking, especially as it applies to children?

00:45:23.600 Absolutely.

00:45:25.100 So I've worked with kids since 2001.

00:45:29.680 Many of the kids that I've worked with actually have special needs, and a lot of them are vaccine-injured children, and I've worked in a therapeutic setting.

00:45:39.500 I've also taught within the classroom to high school students and college students.

00:45:45.900 And so I've really been around children and working with them in an educational way and therapeutic way for my entire adult life.

00:45:57.180 And so now I'm the author of two children's books, I'm Unvaccinated and That's Okay.

00:46:04.780 And my most recent book is Let's Be Critical Thinkers.

00:46:10.920 And critical thinking is, it's crucial.

00:46:14.540 It's a life skill that is crucial for children, and it is really not taught in the schools anymore.

00:46:21.060 And now with the incorporation of AI, we are completely losing critical thought.

00:46:28.520 And I just, I want to give you some stats real fast.

00:46:31.320 Right now, Gen Z, like our Gen Z kids are at 97% of them are using AI, just for everyday tasks and stuff like that.

00:46:45.160 Back in 2023, schools were only incorporating AI about 18%.

00:46:53.240 And now a new study that just was reported recently on Education Week, 60% of schools in America are incorporating AI into the classroom.

00:47:08.600 And that there's 80% of students are now using AI to complete class work.

00:47:16.920 So, you know, what is this really doing to critical thought?

00:47:21.720 It's destroying it.

00:47:23.280 It's causing intellectual laziness.

00:47:25.940 It's causing the erosion of curiosity, stunted cognitive development.

00:47:32.400 You know, how are kids going to be able to know how to create their own argument or take a stance on a certain topic?

00:47:40.000 But this is really, we're headed down a very slippery slope here for children and our future generations.

00:47:50.280 You know, we all have anecdotes that we can talk about.

00:47:55.260 People whose children or many people whose own, their own children have become addicted to or bonded with AI.

00:48:02.980 I hear from teachers all the time exactly what you're describing, this lack of curiosity, this kind of deadness in the eye, this reliance on the machines.

00:48:11.960 But to hear those statistics, it really chills me to the bone.

00:48:17.000 We see all of these pushes to get AI into education.

00:48:21.440 We also see the more sleazy corporate attempts like with Elon Musk's Baby Grok, which they may roll out any day now, or Meta's AI companions, which, as we reported just last week,

00:48:37.800 the Reuters investigation uncovered internal standards, which allow for the bot to speak to children in, let's just say, incredibly inappropriate ways, sensual ways, so to speak.

00:48:54.940 So as you see all of this, is there any way around it?

00:48:59.000 Is there any, what is the solution?

00:49:01.300 How can parents protect their children?

00:49:03.060 And at a wider societal scale, what do we do about this?

00:49:07.800 Well, it's, it's very scary.

00:49:09.940 I'm a, I'm a mother of two kids and it's very scary because especially coming out of the pandemic,

00:49:16.640 children are lonelier than they've ever been before.

00:49:20.080 And they're constantly on their computers and their phones.

00:49:24.960 It's not like, you know, back in the day when you and I were kids and I would be playing outside all the time with my neighbors, you know?

00:49:33.500 So kids are lonelier today.

00:49:37.140 And so they're turning to these AI companions.

00:49:40.760 And, and it is very scary that, you know, children can be groomed through these AI apps.

00:49:47.100 And so parents really, they need to engage in conversation with their children and, and have these open conversations, letting them know that there are predators online who can really kind of take control of AI and create these, you know, deep fakes and impersonation.

00:50:07.960 And that, you know, an AI companion is, is not an actual friend.

00:50:16.100 So many people are actually adults, adults are turning to AI companionship for, for what they're seeing as love and affection.

00:50:27.640 And that's, I mean, that is so scary.

00:50:32.780 And so really, and when it comes to our children, parents really have to have, they have to educate themselves and they have to have these open conversations with children and let them know of the dangers and what to be aware of online.

00:50:45.380 Well, Shannon, we really look forward to having you back.

00:50:50.800 If you would, please just tell the audience where they can find your books, where they can follow your professional work and where they can find you on social media.

00:51:00.220 So people can find me at drshannonkroner.com.

00:51:04.440 That's drshannonkroner.com.

00:51:06.520 And my book, Let's Be Critical Thinkers, it can be ordered today on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or any major book selling website, as well as my previous book, I'm Unvaccinated and Not Local.

00:51:21.660 Dr. Shannon Kroner, thank you very much for coming on again.

00:51:24.400 We look forward to having you back.

00:51:26.560 Thank you so much.

00:51:29.740 All right, War Room Posse, I should probably leave you with some sort of positive vision for the future.

00:51:35.260 I just want to remind you that the sun is still shining.

00:51:38.800 The children are still playing.

00:51:40.840 Your heart is still beating, presumably and presumably for a little while longer.

00:51:45.300 And of course, God smiles down upon us, hopefully with a great sense of humor, because I can tell you this right now.

00:51:52.320 If this isn't funny, it's not justified.

00:51:55.220 Thank you very much for your time and attention.

00:51:57.640 And we look forward to seeing you again tomorrow.

00:52:01.000 God bless.

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Bannon's War Room - August 20, 2025

WarRoom Battleground EP 832： Machine Gods, AI-Powered Nukes, and a Global Village of the Damned

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