Circuit Breaker?

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I'm a kind of glass-half-full sort of bloke: an eternal optimist, and a believer in the basic humanity of our species. I'm also a realist with a keen sense of historical context: as a species, aside from great art, music and literature - the good stuff - we've also inflicted great harms on ourselves as humans, and on the home planet we all share, rent-free, from the Universe itself. The ultimate social housing project. Except that socialism has never been good enough for the more selfish and venal amongst us. So we continue to tread a path that will ultimately destroy us all. This is the currently-trending parallel narrative of the 'threat' of A.I to the our species and death by the 'others'. By the the way, it's interesting to note that this dystopian narrative arc includes only us and our creation; Artificial Intelligence. It ignores the vast majority of creation that exponentially outnumbers us here on Earth, and which almost certainly would be better off without our presence here to fuck it all up, which seems to be our forte.

Will A.I be the death of us all? Philosophically and potentially physically, maybe, but one thing seems to have escaped the current crop of doom-mongers: we created the bugger, and we own and control the 'off' switch that can level the sod for good, if need be. This will, unfortunately, necessitate turning off the internet: simply switching off the A.I servers is probably already too late, given the level of sophistication of self-propagation that A.I has already achieved through human laxity and greed. The corollary of ditching the internet is, of course, these days, utterly non-trivial: we are now, having sleep-walked blindly and trustingly into a world that relies absolutely on the network for everything, and totally subservient to something that didn't even exist as such just thirty-five years ago. Hitting the reset button to halt any form of rogue A.I/collaborative-bad-human-actor would now risk throwing us back into a pre-industrial society within which we would simply have no contingency plans to survive. Is A.I the threat? Nope: it's us...


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