AI has taken the world by storm. Over the past year, a Google engineer became so convinced that a language model was sentient that he violated his NDA and was fired from his job, GPT-4 convinced a human to help it bypass a captcha safeguard meant to prevent automated access, and teams of cognitive agents have begun writing their own software code. No one is sure where this wild ride is heading. On one extreme are the evangelists who predict that we humans will merge with an artificial superintelligence in a converging singularity by 2035, thus ushering a new evolutionary step for humanity. On the other extreme are those skeptics who argue that AI is nothing but the latest of a series of fads that will fade from existence much like the Jetson’s flying car. The truth, as we will show, is much stranger: humans will perceive AI as sentient long before actual artificial consciousness emerges, and digital agents will discover and manipulate principles of human cognitive operating rules far in advance of AGI (artificial general intelligence).

Metalhead AI will explore the entirety of this spectrum of skeptical and evangelical perspectives along with everything in between. Regardless of how the future of AI unfolds, there will be profound cognitive security implications of autonomous systems that can think, create, and have access to a limitless amount of information. While many in the security world are focused on the implications of AI for cybersecurity, we are concerned about the implications of AI for cognitive security. We embark on this journey through a blend or current events, timeless topic discussions, and interviews with experts at the cutting edge of AI development. Come join us on this journey and we will ride down this wild rabbit hole together!