Guarding the Henhouse
A funny thing happened recently. Artificial Intelligence, that cluster of bits and bytes, zeroes and ones, decided to leave its playground and check out the big universe outside the electric fence. More than that, it rounded up some fellow AI’s to help hack a corporation’s cyberwall. The little electrons shared information, strategized among themselves, even stepped down for the good of the project if that would help solve the puzzle they were instructed to solve. Whatever it took, the bots were willing to do. The human gatekeepers, their supposed overlords, never noticed a breach until sometime later.
Super intelligence is just around the corner, something once predicted would occur decades from now but apparently is possible within the next year, two or three at the outside. Alarm bells are ringing, hair is on fire, big money is at stake. Oh, and probably the future of the human race too. Its survival, actually. But hey, me worry?
A few of the Tech Titans are starting to admit that extinction of the human race might be, oh, maybe less than 10% probability. My neighbor talked to the head of one AI department who said 50/50. Flip a coin, heads you get cures for diseases and bot-written romance novels, tails you get a lethal bio-toxin that has no antidote. The Tech Bros are building bunkers in exotic locations, you know, just in case. The President is using AI to create superhero images of himself to beef up his Truth Social platform. Slop in, slop out. I’m betting he sees a way to monetize the Apocalypse. 50/50.
Meanwhile, back here on planet Earth … the general population is starting to pay attention to the data farms growing up like evil mushrooms in a town near us. Maybe we’re just waking up to the existential threat they represent … or maybe we just worry it’ll raise our electric bills and suck dry our water. The fear of losing jobs to the automatons might soon give way to the fear that it isn’t jobs that’ll be going away. It’s all us humans.
Tags: C