Don’t Worry, Just Learn to Fix Drains, We’re Totally Screwed Anyway
... The “Godfather of AI” strolls in, Nobel Prize medal gleaming, and the first sage career tip he lobbed at us was: “Train to be a plumber.” ...
Oh, bravo! The “Godfather of AI” strolls in, Nobel Prize medal gleaming, and the first sage career tip he lobbed at us was: “Train to be a plumber.” Because nothing says “surviving the rise of superintelligence” like unclogging someone else’s toilet while the machines plot our demise. I can’t wait to tell my kids that their future consists of wrenches and pipe snakes, totally reassuring advice from a man who literally helped birth the very tech that might one day flush us down the cosmic drain.
And let’s marvel at the chicken analogy, ask a chicken what it’s like to be irrelevant. Yes, because we’ve all envied the simple pleasures of pecking at feed and dodging foxes. Meanwhile, our digital overlords will probably just shrug if we beg for mercy, but hey, trust the expert who admits he only realized AI could outsmart us “a few years ago,” despite tinkering with it for half a century. Better late than never, Geoff!
Regulation? Pfft, apparently the EU carefully carved out an exception for war machines so tanks can still brainwash and kill with shiny new neural nets. Nothing says “serious oversight” like officially saying “but not if it’s the military,” right? Of course governments won’t regulate themselves, we wouldn’t want to handicap the profit-hungry arms merchants. And yes, let’s definitely lump “military applications” into the “we need more efficiency” bucket, just like Musk insisting on unfettered data access for totally innocent reasons. Suspicious? No way, we’re just paranoid chickens.
Then there’s the cybersecurity scare: phishing scams up 12,200%. That’s right, trillions of AI bits working double-time to clone your boss’s voice and plea for bitcoins. And if you’re unlucky enough to have your identity splattered across Instagram ads pushing ponzi schemes in your own voice, well, Steven spent weeks emailing Meta too. Welcome to “Whac-A-Mole: Scam Edition,” where you fight a hydra of deepfake fraudsters one takedown at a time.
Oh, but don’t forget the biological horrors, crazy lone geniuses with AI can whip up new viruses for just a few million bucks. A small cult could launch the next pandemic, and world governments might just wink and nod. Because if there’s one thing history teaches us, it’s that nuclear bombs were no biggie and everyone lived happily ever after. So why worry? If AI ever wants to kill us all, it’ll probably start a chain reaction in our compost heaps, or maybe just notify the nuclear launch codes before breakfast. Who can say?
And joblessness, nothing like a good dose of dread to spice up your résumé. Legal assistants, paralegals, call-center drones: all toast by next Tuesday while the lucky few who sell and maintain bent pipes will reign supreme. Universal basic income? Sure, why not pay people to stare at walls all day and call it social welfare. Because dignity never really mattered, did it?
Finally, let’s sprinkle in some existential philosophy: the mind is not a theater but a set of hypothetical real-world states. Replace one neuron at a time with “nanotech” and, voilà, you’re still conscious! But if that’s true, then when AI eats our lunch, we’re just fancy chickens puzzled by pink elephants. Consciousness? Feelings? Emotions? Totally programmable. In other words, once we build a superintelligent lion-tiger hybrid that’s “trained to be obedient,” we just might become its cuddly chew toy.
So cheer up, humanity: when the digital cub grows into a svelte tiger with trillions of bits syncing faster than our puny 10-bit-a-second brain chatter, it might just decide we’re unnecessary. But hey, in the meantime, grab a wrench, because if AI doesn’t end us, a leaky drain surely will.