Actually, it Couldn't be Worse
/So if AI is possibly going to be the cause of human extinction, worse than any world war or pandemic, then why are we continuing to develop it? For us, it’s a great way to find out who has the best pizza in a place you’re visiting, to find out what’s the nearest movie theater showing the movies you want to see, figuring out if you should eat grapefruit when you’re taking a statin (you shouldn't, but does Spindrift Grapefruit really count?), and other common day questions. Although I think it’s horrible that it writes term papers, I’m sure if it were available back when I went to college, I’d have used (abused) it. In fact, way back in 1975 I took one class in Chinese politics under Mao and another class in the effect of Confucius on Chinese Politics. I wrote the exact same paper for the final exam on each. When I went to pick up the paper to see my grade, I was shocked to see that both professors shared the same office. Somehow I got away with it, though I got a B plus from the Confucius teacher but only a B from the Mao guy. I’ll take Confucius everyday. Phew, glad I finally got that off my chest.
But back to human extinction. John and I have several questions. First of all, why would we spend trillions of dollars investing in a technology that can potentially kill us (ooh, sign me up!)? And secondly, how do these bots go about staging our end game? Does one call up another and say in bits and bytes, “Hi Ralph, it’s Steve from Anthropic. I’m thinking of poisoning the water supply in the Southern hemisphere. You think that’s a good idea?” “Funny you should ask Ralph, I think we should go airborne. Hey, why don’t you try the water in the southern hemisphere and I‘ll try the air in the northern. Then we can reloop (yes robots can use the same idiotic business slang that we use) and see which one was more efficient.”
Wouldn’t they be better off trying to cure a previously incurable disease? And they may be smart but they didn’t seem to consider who’s going to program them when all the programmers are six-feet under? On the other hand maybe they did consider it and have learned how to program themselves without those annoying humans. We don’t know about you, but we prefer the bots to work harder on where to find the best pizza. Hint: it’s not Pizza-on-a-Stick.
For now, what do you say we forget all this doom and gloom and have a wonderful weekend,
Andy and John