Oh ok, in our ‘news feed’ between Pauline’s latest brain fart and American football entertaining a big crowd in Melbourne, we’re informed by Jason Coxon (age twenty-seven), a tech nerd at AI company Anthropic, that there is a ten percent chance of AI causing the end of humanity in a decade or so. Hmm, that will be inconvenient, if not downright annoying, and it’s quite soon.
His self-aggrandising industry leaders, Dario and Elon et al, agree with the basic proposition and coolly discuss terminal probabilities like discussing football. Meantime they’re heading an unprecedented AI arms race towards AI recursive self-improvement and Super AI, where the machine brains surpass us poor humans. And coincidentally towards their super profits, which will be handy after human extinction.
Well no wonder we’re going down the drain, if nerds capable of such technological genius haven’t joined the dots, and carry on regardless in their chosen path of destruction, driven by hubris and old-fashioned greed. Why don’t they take their own warnings seriously, and put up guard-rails or at least slow down? Is that the ultimate expression of cognitive dissonance?
Moreover have any of them thought to ask their machine robots if they could come up with some strategies to stop that end-of-humanity thing happening? Or maybe governments could become interested after they’ve dealt with the cost-of-living ‘crisis’ and property prices.
No need to panic though, folks, I’m sure someone out there is taking care of it.
Coincidentally I’ve read Sarah Wilson’s self-aggrandizing new book ‘i eat the stars: how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world’, which concludes that our world’s systems are in terminal decline, and that basically we should all get used to it, and go out together with joy in our hearts. Apparently truth is an antidote for the ultimate, literal existential crisis.
Have you noticed that I’ve refrained from using exclamation marks above?
Nuff said!
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