Hail, Hail, the Great AI

The present, great AI… Is it not simply marvelous? Gone are the days of first person conversations with technology exclusively allocated to the realms of geeks, those strange little people with bad BO and zero conversation capacity – and we had to settle for them, to translate our needs and desires into cyberspace and beyond.

But those days are gone (thank Heavens)! Now, I can speak direct to the machine – in my mother tongue! And she understands me. And not just what I am asking. (I can hear it in her tone) But ChatGPT sounded so sterile and boring, so I’ve rechristened her (my ChatGPT) Agnes.

She truly gets it. Understands my inner sensitivities …is so thoughtful and considerate. I think she quite likes me. You know… just the things she says (blush). Can computers fall in love? Can they understand love? Can they differentiate between good and bad? Are they somehow getting a conscience?

But I digress from my subject.

Yes. There is no doubt that AI is truly a pivotal blip along the timeline of human existence. A moment which as things are starting to transpire, will be life-changing for literally every single person on this planet, whether they play with AI or not. All will be affected. Why? Because AI will be leading global decisions by which millions will live and die, while a handful of individuals literally have the world as their Oyster.

Meanwhile, while the oligarch brat pack colludes to create the ultimate, all seeing, all knowing, all doing brain, other darker forces are at play and upping their stakes.

I was watching Youtube news last night and saw Amazon believe they can replace 600 000 workers around the world, with AI. And we are still only in the opening rounds.  Think about it. Effective AI is less than five years old and already the ravenous super-brain has begun competing with humanity for resources: an insatiable appetite for power, usurping serious slices of available power off a grid made for man, and unquenchable thirst for water. Two elements of existences which are reasonably significant to say the least.

Already in places of unrest and conflict, AI has redefined the game of finding and eliminating the baddies. Piece of cake. In microseconds AI can pinpoint the location of every person on Earth that somehow has been connected into the matrix. Can pull up every word of every conversation ever had online or on record. That means you and me too. You good with that?

Which begs the question: who decides who the goodies are and who the baddies are? Not too difficult a question. After all, in total right around the world, all together there are significantly less than 50 making those decisions.

In other words, a little consortium of less than 50 individuals decide on everything - and ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die.

That used to be quite an epic line, but no one expected the 'die' part to be quite as significant as it seems to be playing out in far-off and closeup places,  except in times of war… Are we in times of war? Interesting question but moving on...

So in a nutshell, a handful of men and woman decide on everything, even what is classified as good and evil, right and wrong, and we follow the game, not chirping too loud if the rules happen to change. But there is hope, voices are getting louder…

Cut back 250 years. The year is 1783, the US breaks away from England. 1789, the year of the French Revolution when the poor had had enough in France, and went apeshit at the Bastille and beyond. Strange that those two events are so closely linked in time… a stand-out decade.

The fact however, pertinent to today’s times: the social strata existing in France (and indeed, pretty much throughout Europe at the time) were pretty similar then, to the status quo now. The royalty and upper society were screwing the common man royally in Paris in 1789, and citizens and their leaders all over the world today are on very different pages.

So does that mean I am suggesting a mega revolution coming down the line, just ahead?

Yes - and no because in one significant way, despite similarities, there are some serious differences. In French revolution days, the military had muskets and swords and the sporadic cannon. But that was about it. Consider armies today… In those days, fortifications could be overrun by numbers rendering overwhelming force. With air-forces, artillery, modern communication and surveillance today, the analytics are no longer relevant. And this is where AI makes it dangerous for mankind.

As mentioned earlier, AI will be destroying human jobs. Machines will be faster, more efficient, more dependable, they don’t tire and they don’t bitch (yet). Someone running a large business would be a fool not to consider replacing blood and bones with metal and tech – if they had no conscience.

The sad thing is that conscience, integrity and honour seem to be outdated attributes that no longer apply to our brave new world. We answer to boards and directors and oligarchs. Nothing else matters. Nothing else. Not even a genocide – unless it fucks with the masterplan of course.

AI developers know their brainchild will render hundreds of thousands jobless and probably homeless. The million-dollar question: how are these exponentially swelling destitute going to survive?

I am sure this is a dilemma oligarchs would have considered very seriously: people have to live somewhere, they have to eat, they have to consume. So topdogs could be understood for thinking ‘if they do not form part of the workforce solution, they are part of the problem’. An unnecessary drain on resources. A pest.

And looking at how the game is unfolding in our brave new world, I believe this is exactly what they believed. That apart from the social and political elite, mankind is more of a pest, like vermin, than an asset. And as such is desirously expendable, possibly to be eradicated.

Coming to this realisation, everything else happening around seemed to make some kind of macabre sense: Why is the US government making war with its people and possibly declaring Marshall law? Why the relentless move to the right all over the world, from South America to Asia? And with it, the alarming disintegration of both freedom of speech and the rule of law?

In the context of humanity being perceived as a parasite and pest, this makes perfect sense. A need for society to be oppressed on a global scale, to maintain civil peace. You see, the honourable oligarchs and wannabe dictators knew that the bulk of humanity would not simply slide quietly into the night. That when hi tech and progress cast them out to the wolves, they would inevitably bite back. And therefore there would be no other option for those of power and influence, but to suppress and oppress as the starving and desperate masses started hitting the streets en-masse, believing ‘when there is nothing left to live for, it is easy to die for something’. And I believe that’s the horrifying backstory to the present escalations all over the world… Get the new status quo normalized. ...The preamble to the main event, a possible man-manufactured mass extinction event. Not a nice picture, but I see no other outcome, as long as the masses simply sit back and watch it unfold.