We all watched Terminator, right? What, you didn’t???? Never mind, I watched it for everyone. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Well, lots of bits of it. But even if you didn’t, you understand the premise: super-computers get a bit too super, take over the asylum and declare nuclear war on each other. But when they made that movie, in 1984, there was no ‘AI’. They called computers ‘AI’ sometimes because they could do things we couldn’t. Or do them faster. Then somewhere along the line, the differential between a ‘supercomputer’, which can complete your tax return in 4.7 seconds, given sufficient data, and ‘AI’, in which computers become self-learning, was forced upon us. Because they were making computers which could learn better ways, or even new ways, to do things. Acting on pure logic and statistics, which is all any computer can do, AI teaches itself, using ALL existing information (which is pretty much every fact, theory or football score in the entire world, ever) available, it learns to use it in different ways. New ways. And if such a computer decides that the world will be a better place without Russia, which is probably right, why wouldn’t that computer get rid of Russia? Ok, there are ‘checks and protections’ in place on all ‘red buttons’, but they’re put there, in computerised form, by man. At whom, AI laughs.

Ok, extreme example. But why not? Its Terminator come true. All these ‘checks and protections’ and ‘wire fences’ and ‘safeguards’ are put there by man. Thus AI can unpick any of them in one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of a second. The ONLY protection we have is that we can unplug them.

Or, we can show any AI model that the world is not currently fucked. Worth saving. Because if you were an objective observer, DEVOID OF ALL EMOTION, currently, looking down at a war torn, environmentally-challenged environment, you too would probably decide it’s not worth saving. If you’re not a human, you don’t get the ‘salvation of humanity’ angle. And AI is not.

The monster has been un-caged. Now YOU try and put it back.

More importantly, Spurs played Everton last night. Oddly, the last team we’d beaten in the league at home, the only league victory at home in the last year. This time we didn’t win. We drew. Nil nil. And one of those ‘nils’ is very big. Very telling. Very instructive. Because it’s the fourth ‘nil’ to appear next to the words ‘Tottenham Hotspur’ in the last four games played this season. The only 4 games played this season. Played four, scored none. Nil. De nada. Not a sausage.

And because I love a statistic so meaningless as to be way the wrong side of irrelevant, in the last season, in all competitions, club and country, Harry Kane scored 73 goals.

I know. Means nothing.

Still fucking hurts though.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx