Humanity Will Be Wiped Out, Again
Why Artificial Intelligence won’t actually be a threat, despite endless sensationalistic assertions to the contrary
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Lest we forget, media organizations rely on grabbing monetizable eyeballs by any means possible. As ordinary people are captivated, albeit briefly, by mindless sensation it follows that media organizations are fundamentally in the business of generating endless mindless sensationalist content so as to generate profits for shareholders and fat bonuses for their executives. As the “news” is merely a sub-category of general entertainment is also follows that the “news” is by no means immune to this basic economic imperative. Even supposedly non-profit organizations such as the UK’s BBC must show that they are attracting sufficient numbers of eyeballs in order to justify their government subsidy.
And so it is that ordinary people are perpetually being covered in a never-ceasing torrent of intellectual effluent, the sole purpose of which is to attract attention for long enough that ads can be served and data harvested for later sale. It matters not that this perpetual river of mental vomit is profoundly harmful both on an individual level and for society as a whole; so long as money can be generated, all is good.
The latest vapid nonsense to be spewed out of the media maw is the risible idea that Artificial Intelligence (henceforth AI for the sake of brevity) will result in human extinction. While the more thoughtful among us may consider such an outcome highly desirable, the point of such idle babble is to generate anxiety among ordinary people so that they are induced to stare for longer and therefore can be served more ads. Much of the mass media is now coalescing around this fatuous narrative, so it’s time to consider the validity of the claims being made.
We begin with the usual strategy of citing one or two anomalous “experts” whose doomsday predictions have the necessary apocalyptic tone. It matters not if they know nothing about AI (Stephen Hawking) so long as they are well-known; conversely it doesn’t matter if they are not well-known provided they can be cited as knowledgeable about AI (the Center for AI Safety). It’s even better if they are well-known and ordinary people can believe they know…
