On Steam Trains and Futuristic Monsters.

If I go a day without making a blog post the day feels incomplete. And so last night, having gone three days without writing one, I set about filling the void. I spent an hour rambling on about a particular set of petty bureaucrats being pettily bureaucratic as usual, and taking political correctness beyond the bounds of acceptability. I had to break off at one point, and so I left it with the intention of completing it later. When later came I decided it was utterly tedious and cast it aside.

This is a symptom of a wider issue. I’ve reached the point of feeling like an old steam locomotive which has run out of steam. All the old sparkles which used to provide the fuel to heat the boiler to produce the energy to keep moving onwards have gone now, and I see no more in prospect.

So where is this going? I don’t know; I’m whinging and I don’t want whinging to become my only attribute. But I must say this:

The state of the world and the human condition is driving me to distraction these days, and I said recently that I’m becoming ever more convinced that a major sea shift in the affairs of mankind is looming. I was expecting it to be brought about by one of the three currently perceived threats – climate change, economic meltdown, or another world war. But it seems that a fourth is possibly more imminent, and that’s the development of artificial intelligence.

Many of the scientists currently working on AI are going public with their belief that AI is a potential monster which could threaten not only the way we’re used to living, but our very existence as a species. And they’re not joking. Some say that all further development must stop immediately, while others take the view that we simply need to be more careful. But their views probably don’t count for much anyway because AI has attracted the attention of the military machines owned by the world’s major powers, and if there’s one thing military machines won’t permit, it’s the possibility of falling behind the game. And so development is bound to continue, like it or not.

It’s being speculated by those in the know that AI will reach the point of being capable of annihilating the human race in as little as ten years if it should choose to do so. They say that this is not science fantasy, nor even science fiction; this is real.

So now where do I go? I have no idea, except to hope that this old steam locomotive will be cold and permanently stationery by the time the sentient robots – which have ‘no moral compass’, as the popular phrase has it – reach their potential.