Apropos of nothing…

my favourite phrase. Everything I have said, do say and will say could probably be preceded by that disclaimer. I like irrelevant. I like disconnected. I like nothing.

And I like joining up the dots, however out there those dots may be.

So this week they’ve been talking on the news each night about Artificial Intelligence. Not the type apparent in many mps, but the other type, intelligence generated by computers. Teaching computers to learn how to think for themselves. Not necessarily robots. More like the computer that taught itself to become a chess grand-master. Something we could all have done but just lacked the time.

But life imitates art. Much as art imitates life. Nothing confusing there. So we ‘know’ for a ‘fact’, because we’ve all watched Terminator (1, 2 and 3, where it all turned to shit), that if you let computers build the next generation of computers they take over the world, create a nuclear holocaust, build Arnold Schwartzenegger, programme him to speak with a stupid accent and send him back from the post-apocalyptic wasteland of ‘the future’ to come back in time to murder Jeremy Corbyn’s mum.

What a tragedy that would be. The leader of the Opposition suddenly disappears whilst not kneeling before the Queen or not singing the national anthem. Vanishes before our very eyes.

And yet the quest for AI continues with massive investment from Google to everyone else in IT. As it should really.

Unless they’ve all (like I have) been reading Ken Follett’s Edge of Eternity this week too. A great, easy-read Follett-sage (they’re all bloody sagas) set in the early 60s. In particular at the Cuban missile crisis. When the world came (in reality, not just in fiction) within a whisker (or something else very very small) of nuclear war. Russia had its missiles pointed at America from their Cuban bases, America in return pointed everything they had in Turkey (missiles couldn’t reach from America at that time) at every Russian city and major town. And it was a major face-off like there has never been before, with no-one wanting war but no-one prepared to lose face or show weakness. A bit like the rugby. But with more devastating potential even than that 20 stone Fijian winger who runs 100 metres sub-11-seconds.

We don’t have the cold war any longer. Though in 1962 it almost became a war so hot that the world would have been a melted wasteland for hundreds of years. Russia are now our friends. Unless you’re gay, Ukrainian, Crimean or a decent human being. So fingers have been withdrawn from buttons, hopefully never to reach out again.

But if computers design computers to design other computers and all the systems are literally ‘out of our hands’, then what happened at Cyberdyne Systems in 1984 could happen RIGHT NOW!!!!

Terminator meets Ken Follett meets the Cuban missile crisis and WE’RE ALL FUCKING DEAD!!!

Happy Saturday

A xxxx