Webinar | Xi’s Weaponization of A.I.: The CCP and the Transhumanist Threat to Our Future

With each passing day, concerns are growing about the prospects that artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly approaching the point where it will surpass and ultimately endanger humans. That is especially true if the Chinese Communist Party can realize its ambition to weaponize such technology against us in its pursuit of global hegemony.

As author Arthur Herman put it in Commentary Magazine recently: “The fate of societies and economies founded on Western liberal principles hangs in the balance – a future that Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party want to replace with their own totalitarian template.”

A front-page article in the Epoch Times last week led with the ominous headline: “Ignoring Global Risks, CCP Develops A.I. Weapons.” It went on to report: “Eager to militarily surpass the United States, the CCP is unlikely to heed safeguards related to lethal AI technologies, which are increasingly dangerous in their own right….The nature of the technology is prone to feeding some of the worst tendencies of the human psyche in general.”

It continued: “Reliance on the whispers of an AI military adviser, one that instills confidence by processing mountains of data and producing convincing battle plans, could be particularly dangerous, as it may create a vision of victory where there previously wasn’t one, according to [Communist China expert Dr. Bradley] Thayer. ‘You can see how that might be very attractive to a decision maker, especially one that is hyper-aggressive, as is the CCP. It may make aggression more likely.’”

In his book, Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity, Joe Allen presents a leading transhumanist’s terrifying assessment of the magnitude of the danger posed by this technology: “The foremost voice of ‘AI doom’ is Eliezer Yudkowsky….[His] goal is not to halt the creation of godlike AI. He wants that to happen. Nor is it to keep a few people from getting killed. His goal is to stop unaligned AI from killing everyone before we find a way to live forever. His bar for success is horrific. In June 2022, he wrote, ‘If you can get a powerful artificial general intelligence that carries out some pivotal superhuman engineering task with less than a fifty percent chance of killing more than one billion people, I’ll take it.’”

This week’s CPDC webinar examines with these three authors the magnitude of the danger we face from the Chinese Communists’ pursuit of advanced AI technology and dictator Xi Jinping’s apparently headlong pursuit of superiority in translating it and the transhumanist initiatives it can make possible – e.g., super-warriors and swarms of man-out-of-the-loop killing machines – into potentially genocidal weaponry. We also consider how the United States must respond.

Moderator:

- Frank Gaffney, Founder and Executive Chairman, Center for Security Policy; Vice Chairman, Committee on the Present Danger: China, co-author, “The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China, and the World”

Panelists:

- Dr. Arthur Herman, PhD, Senior Fellow and Director of the Quantum Alliance Initiative at the Hudson Institute; author of nine books, including “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II;” and essayist, including “China and Artificial Intelligence: The Cold War We’re Not Fighting” in “Commentary Magazine”
• Topic: “What is the Chinese Communist Party Doing to Weaponize A.I.?”

- Dr. Bradley Thayer, PhD, Former Professor; columnist at American Greatness; co-author: “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure”
• Topic: “What Do the CCP’s Efforts to Weaponize A.I. Tell Us about the Nature of Its Agenda and the Threat it Poses to America and the World?”

- Joe Allen, Writer and Tech Correspondent for War Room Pandemic; author, “Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity;” essayist at “The Federalist,” “American Thinker” and “The National Pulse”
• Topic: “The Future of War: A.I.-enabled Threats and How America Can, and Must, Defend Against Them.”