Let’s cut to the chase. The biggest threat of Artificial Intelligence is dependency. To be more specific, society will become dependent on Artificial General Intelligence shortly after it’s unveiled to the world. Why? Because AGI will be able to solve problems we know we have. It will be able to solve problems we don’t know we have. It will be able to solve problems we don’t have yet but will in the future.
If it sounds like I’m giving too much credit to AGI, then you aren’t familiar enough with AGI to appreciate what it will be able to do. Below, I’ll try to explain it better even though it would probably take several chapters of a book to do justice to the risks. But first, I want to offer two perspectives as primers. Here’s an article by Mac Slavo at SHTF Plan describing what some tech experts are saying about AI. Then, I’ll let ChatGPT give its somewhat comical answer about the risks that AI represents. Finally, I’ll go into why dependency will be the big one. First, here’s Mac Slavo…
Tech Experts Say AI Poses a “Human Extinction” Risk
Experts on artificial intelligence are coming out and warning of a “human extinction” risk with the progressing technology. Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, along with executives from Google’s AI arm DeepMind and Microsoft, were among those who supported and signed the short statement.
“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,” said the letter. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” the letter asked.
Other tech leaders such as Tesla’s Elon Musk and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have cautioned about the risks AI poses to human society. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement Tuesday read according to a report by CNBC.
In an open letter released back in March, Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and several tech leaders urged AI labs to stop training systems to be more powerful than GPT-4, which is OpenAI’s latest large language model. They also called for a six-month pause on such advanced development.
The technology has gathered pace in recent months after chatbot ChatGPT was released for public use in November and subsequently went viral. In just two months after its launch, it reached 100 million users. ChatGPT has amazed researchers and the general public with its ability to generate humanlike responses to users’ prompts, suggesting AI could replace jobs and imitate humans.
The statement added that it can be “difficult to voice concerns about some of advanced AI’s most severe risks” and had the aim of overcoming this obstacle and opening up the discussions.
ChatGPT has arguably sparked much more awareness and adoption of AI as major firms around the world have raced to develop rival products and capabilities.
The consequences of putting humanity’s existence into the hands of artificial intelligence, which has no morals or compassion could be dire.
What Does AI Think of AI?
Since Artificial Intelligence is able to write articles, I asked ChatGPT to write one. The query was simple: “Please write an article about the threats of Artificial Intelligence.”
Here’s how ChatGPT answered the query…
The Growing Concerns: Unveiling the Threats of Artificial Intelligence (As Described by ChatGPT)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force across various sectors, revolutionizing industries and enhancing our daily lives. From autonomous vehicles to voice assistants, AI has undoubtedly made remarkable strides. However, as AI continues to advance, concerns regarding its potential threats and risks have also gained momentum. It is crucial to understand and address these issues to ensure responsible and ethical deployment of AI systems.
Job Displacement: One of the primary concerns surrounding AI is its impact on employment. As AI technology becomes more sophisticated, there is a legitimate fear that automation and intelligent machines could replace human workers in various industries. While automation has historically led to job shifts rather than complete job loss, it is essential to support affected individuals through upskilling and retraining programs to mitigate the potential negative effects on the workforce.
Ethical Considerations: AI systems are built on algorithms and machine learning models that learn from vast amounts of data. This reliance on data raises ethical concerns, particularly in areas such as privacy, bias, and fairness. If the data used to train AI models is biased or incomplete, it can perpetuate existing social and cultural biases or discriminate against certain groups. It is crucial to implement rigorous guidelines and practices to ensure fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI systems.
Security Risks: AI systems can be vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. As AI becomes more integrated into critical infrastructure, industries, and even military applications, the potential for exploitation and malicious use increases. Adversarial attacks, where AI systems are manipulated to make incorrect decisions, pose a significant risk. Safeguarding AI technologies against these threats requires robust security measures, rigorous testing, and continuous monitoring.
Loss of Human Control: As AI systems become more complex and autonomous, there is a concern that they may operate beyond human control or comprehension. This lack of transparency can lead to a loss of accountability and raise questions about who is responsible when AI systems make consequential decisions. Developing mechanisms for human oversight and control, along with ensuring explainability and interpretability of AI algorithms, is essential to maintain ethical standards and prevent unintended consequences.
Social Impact and Inequality: The widespread adoption of AI can exacerbate existing social inequalities. Access to AI technologies, including advanced healthcare diagnostics, personalized education, or AI-powered financial services, may not be equally distributed across all communities. This digital divide could further marginalize underprivileged groups and create a broader socio-economic gap. Efforts must be made to ensure equitable access to AI technologies and prevent the deepening of societal disparities.
Unemployment and Economic Disruption: AI-driven automation could lead to significant shifts in the labor market, potentially causing unemployment and economic disruption. Jobs that are routine and repetitive are most at risk. However, new job opportunities can also emerge as AI technology advances. It is crucial for governments, organizations, and educational institutions to adapt and prepare for these changes by investing in reskilling initiatives and fostering an environment that promotes job creation and entrepreneurship.
While AI holds immense promise, it is vital to approach its development and deployment with a comprehensive understanding of the potential threats and challenges. Striking a balance between innovation and responsible use is key to harnessing the full potential of AI while safeguarding against unintended consequences. A collaborative effort among governments, industry leaders, researchers, and society at large is necessary to ensure the ethical, secure, and inclusive advancement of AI technology for the benefit of humanity.
The Biggest Threat: Dependency
My concern isn’t that Artificial Intelligence won’t be able to fulfill its promise. My fear is that it will. The advancement into the realm of Artificial General Intelligence, which may or may not already exist, opens the door to the type of problem-solving that can and almost certainly will make humans dependent on it.
It would take a whole lot of writing to explain how advanced Artificial General Intelligence would be able to solve problems in ways that we’ve never imagined, but perhaps the easiest way to exemplify it is with the game “Go.” In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has been able to defeat the world’s best human players time and again. But it’s not just the fact that AI won the ancient game. It’s that AI won in ways humans hadn’t conceived before. In fact, many human champions are changing the way they play the game based on ways they saw AI win.
“Its style was different, and it was such an unusual experience that it took time for me to adjust,” said world champion Lee Sedol after losing to Google DeepMind. “AlphaGo made me realize that I must study Go more.”
Many if not most would see this as a benefit of Artificial Intelligence. If they can stretch human ingenuity, how could that be bad? The risk is that with Artificial General Intelligence, it wouldn’t be stretching human ingenuity as we try to keep up. AGI would go far beyond the possible capabilities of humans in nearly every challenge it faces. Then, it will be tasked with solving all of our problems, and unfortunately it will succeed.
It would be better at healthcare. It would be better at educating. It would be better at war. It would be better at art. Widespread, properly powered, sufficiently accessible Artificial General Intelligence would surpass humans in every way. And when it does that, we become dependent on it. No, I’m not referring to you or me as individuals. I’m talking about society. If we’ve learned anything the past three decades, it’s that when technology offers solutions or shortcuts, we accept them as a society every single time.
Advancing AGI won’t be revolutionary like the introduction of television, internet, or search engines. It will completely rewrite human existence because it will “make sense” to the vast majority of people to let AGI handle literally everything. We will think we are the masters of the most powerful tool man every created when in reality we will have created our own slavemaster.
Yes, with AGI, nearly every human on earth will eventually become its slave, and most won’t notice until it’s too late.
The SciFi writers got it wrong. This isn’t about a malevolent superintelligence like Terminator’s SkyNet or a strict purpose-driven totalitarian like in I, Robot. AGI will be extremely useful, so much so that we will no longer need to care for ourselves. And when people don’t need to care for themselves, many of them won’t. It’s a sloppy illustration, but the humans in the Pixar’s WALL-E are a near approximation of what humanity will become with AGI at the helm.
They’ll become dependent. They’ll become slaves. And they’ll fight with everything they have to stifle or remove those of us who object.
If you believe there will be a lot of us who fight the good fight and push back against AGI just because a lot of us are opposed to it today, you haven’t been paying attention to how quickly sentiment can change, especially here in America. Lest we forget, it was less than two decades ago that voters in progressive California voted against gay marriage. It took a couple of years for that to reverse, a few more years for opposition to gay marriage to become anathema, and then a few years after that the state entered full-blown LGBTQIA+ supremacy status.
Elon Musk et al are warning us about Artificial Intelligence today and many are hearing their concerns. But all it will take is AGI doing something beyond current human capacity before sentiment starts shifting rapidly.
This is just a cursory explanation of how AGI will create a fully dependent society in a very short period of time, but hopefully it’s enough to get you thinking. I’m cutting the explanation short because I want feedback. I’ll write a more comprehensive article with citations on the topic in the near future, but this will hopefully spark some conversations. Am I right? Partially right? Completely wrong? You tell me.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
