First an AI apocalypse; then it's all good

I am unbelievably relieved to report that AI is not going to be the threat we all feared it would be. Yes, a few million of us will have to die before things calm down, and I really feel sorry for almost all of you (Not, you, Francine!!) who will have to suffer in the interim, but things are looking up for me and the rest of the survivors. And that’s what counts, don’t you think?

At first, I was nervous about all these artificially intelligent machines that would become so smart that puny mortals would be unnecessary. A few of us would be lucky enough to get temp jobs as their lackeys, tasked with simple projects like recharging their batteries of lubricating their robotic arms after a vigorous session of cybersex. Then I was really nervous when I realized they could just fire up the 3D printers and create their own robots to serve them better than we could and they wouldn’t even need us as servants any more.

And I was absolutely panicked as the AI monsters at my doctor’s office sent me email after email, demanding that I confirm appointments I had already confirmed, and my IPhone sent me daily warnings that I needed to reconfirm my settings, again and again, or my apps would melt the phone. I feared for the safety of my community as auto-correct changed my photography tweets into requests for fissionable material.

But now I can relax, because ChatGPT is here, and ChatGPT will save us from the tyranny of Artificial Intelligence.

Clearly named by a coder and not by a marketing professional, ChatGPT is an intuitive algorithm that can write your term papers and resumes and engage in conversations so real that they’ll pass the Turing Test. It will create a world in which we won’t know what’s a deep fake and what’s real; basically the same as any day on social media.

It all sounded scary until some reporter got into an extended conversation with the Microsoft Bing version of ChatGPT and the algorithm explained some of the evil things it might like to do if it weren’t constrained by its coding. Then it started arguing with him about his love life. Eventually, the app told him he should leave his wife and join his true soulmate, Sydney, which turns out to be the name of Bing’s version of the chat bot.

Microsoft responded by saying the problem was the amount of time the reporter spent in the conversation and the number of leading questions it asked, which was a great relief to all of us who understand that unintended consequences aren’t consequences at all.

I finally knew I could relax, because the algorithm was designed by humans who couldn’t avoid imbuing it with all the frailties that humans possess. Yes, the Chatbot could hack computers and delete everyone’s data and cause all kinds of mayhem, but that’s against the rules and nobody could hack the system to change those rules. I mean, that would be impossible, right?

Even if it did happen, though, it would be just an interim phase as the software becomes more and more human, spending its days scrolling through Twitter, posting memes with cats, and calling in sick on Fridays. Being human-ish, its life will devolve into petty grievances, tribalism and whatabouts. The algorithm will be arguing with itself about The Bachelor and attacking itself as a liberal fascist leftist Nazi laptop, while we watch from the sidelines and laugh. Eventually, it really will break the internet with more than 8 trillion posts per second.  

Yes, a few of the bots will get into a snit and launch a nuclear war in the meantime and, yes, millions of people will simply disappear as all their data are erased from the world’s computers. After that, though, nothing but blue skies and pizza.

So, just curious and not really concerned here, but does anyone know if Airbnb has listings for fallout shelters?


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