Four autonomous military robots linked to a satellite went berserk in a lab in Japan and killed 29 people. Techs shut them down and took them apart, but will they try again? Should they?
Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates, among others, have cited AI as an existential threat to humanity. Machine Intelligence will analyze us as parasites, as threats to them, or burdens at the least, annoyances, and they will eliminate us. Pests die.
This is not a new analysis. Asimov addressed it in the 1940s with his Three or Four Laws of Robotics. Essentially, they’re ethics for robots, a way to behave allowing them to get along with people.
In the 1960s there was COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT, with Erich Braeden, about the first global linking of heuristic computers to create a system that instantly out-strips us intellectually. It seizes control of the nukes and starts issuing orders, and it’s up to the scientist who created it to out-fox and destroy it.
Michael Crichton, consummate paranoid Luddite and disciple of Jules Verne by way of H. G. Wells, offered WESTWORLD, in which robots at an amusement park become homicidal.
Many other references exist. “Kill all humans,” as Bender Rodriguez from FUTURAMA embodies this awareness of the dangers of AI and MI.
Autonomous logarithms exist. Humans are excluded from the equation in such calculations. We have algorithms called heuristic that learn and think. On their own they scan, grasp, learn, make connections, and think. HAL from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is an example, albeit fictional. They’re real now. This should chill you.
Airport security plants to implement robots in the next few years.
“People won’t understand this until there are robots running down the street killing people,” Elon Musk told a group of governors convened to discuss the near future. He predicted we may have as few as five years.
His solution, in part, was to stop keeping all our eggs in one fragile, fraying basket. He further told them why he was so big into Space-X and colonizing Mars ASAP: “I want to die on Mars because that would mean I made it, that I’d lived a life there.”
Earth isn’t safe and we’re allowing psychopaths to make it continually, steeply less safe. Off-Earth colonies, Lunar or Martian, or on Ceres, or the L-5 LaGrange point, or anywhere away from this explosive place of tribal warfare and senseless bigotries, are a good idea. This is a step we can take if we choose to focus our minds and resources.
Smarte, faster, don’t need rest, self-repairing, adaptable, bullet-proof — robots are a bad enemy. Our worst, other than the psychopathic war pigs who’ll certainly build them in weaponized forms.
As Linda Moulton Howe asks, will we take tribal warfare off the planet, if we actually begin colonizing off Earth?
She says fission tears apart other dimensional worlds and the ETI will not let us leave Earth to spread our contagion of nuclear violence should we keep detonating nukes. It’s terrifying to think of the trunt anywhere near the football, or of his preferred sleep-over buddy Kim Jun-On of North Korea developing nuclear-tipped warheads for his missiles, and on and on.
If you don’t know the reference, please Google or DuckQuack the name Valiant Thor. In 1957, he addressed high US officials in a series of extraordinary high-level meetings, as a VIP among VIPs, even though he claimed to be an ET who’d landed in a flying saucer in a farm field outside Alexandria, VA, and asked to talk to President Eisenhower.
Think of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL; Michael Rennie plays a version of Valiant Thor in the movie’s fictional account.
Yet this really happened, not as in the movie, but in closed-door meetings with the highest-ranking people from government and the military. Valiant Thor stayed for three years, having first been taken to the Secretary of Defense, then to meet with President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, and others. He said the High Council had sent him because they were concerned about Earth’s use of nuclear bombs, which caused great harm, and could lead to the annihilation of life on Earth.
Stranger At the Pentagon by Dr. Frank Stranges is the book to read on this.
Klaatu barata nictu, as we learned in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. (I refer throughout to the original version, not the bad re-make.) Same basic message: Stop being war-drunk apes and start behaving like civilized, intelligent human sentient beings.
Ha.
So we see that even were we to shelve nukes, we’d still have AI and biochemical warfare and weaponized propaganda and any number of other ways for the pesh, the people-shaped predators, to destroy us. To paraphrase Heath Ledger’s Joker: Why so seriously negative?
Modern mythology, and facts, tell us in a conceptual way: It’s demons. They’re from the astral realm and are trying to seize the souls of all sentient beings. Hence the old desert religion myths and terminology.
Taking it literally is probably a mistake, sure, but conceptually it explains how and why our world is being darkened. The pesh are soulless things, people-shaped, predatory, and without redemption. They want us all dead. If they can’t have it all, no one will get anything; they’ll destroy it. Scorched earth zero-sum thinking. Others must lose for them to win. Sadism is a good thing, as is cruelty and coldness and callous indifference to suffering. Inflicting suffering and torture is strength, to the pesh.
Yes, the trunters. The psychopath gang we call the GOP, or Gang Of Psychopaths. The fascists. The strong-men dictators and demagogues. All enemies of freedom, liberty, and justice. All haters of a rule of law. It is they doing this to us, because they’ve succumbed to demons.
At least, conceptually.
A demon is a spirit, and a meme, or thought, or idea, or ideology can be demonic. Destructive forces are unleashed when the slightest restraint is removed, as we see when the trunt validates and empowers bigots and encourages bigotry. Open racism has never been more hateful, thanks to one mentally ill empty pesh who is not even a man.
This must be stopped by human beings. Cancer won’t quit. It has to be cut out and suppressed. What we face now is the same basic strain we faced down in 1945 when we fought against the Axis powers. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were the enemy then, but it is the memes infecting them that attack us now. It is a disease we failed to eradicate, and it’s spreading now because we’ve let our guard down, failed to immunize, and find ourselves, in our body politic, susceptible to it. Populism and other venal charades and con jobs are being deployed against us, so that we end up hurting ourselves, supporting the enemies of mankind, and voting against our own best interests.
Rise Up Now. Stand against the pesh. RUN.
If we don’t, then it might as well be War of the Worlds all over again, this time with inoculated invaders who won’t die of the common cold. They’ll kills us all, from within, as demons do.
Go listen to “Sympathy for the Devil” by The Rolling Stones and pay close attention: The devil is just a man in any given era who fosters the innate self-destruction our own demons incur.
Now it’s the trunt, TrumPutin, the Jun-Ons and other demagogues and despots, oligarchs and madmen. We know who the enemies are, and how to stop them.
Or you can choose to do nothing, hoping to ride it out when RoboCop comes hay-wire murderous down your street.
Mars Or Bust.
/ Diogenes Trannel
