You've Been Warned
About Artificial Intelligence, self-driving cars and the perils of 2024...
So I’m watching a documentary about military weapons systems and Artificial Intelligence and a guy from the Pentagon says they would never, ever, never, ever let a weapons system make the decision to fire itself and then they show a guy who builds weapons systems saying of course it’s only a matter of time until weapons systems are making those decisions because they make them much faster than humans.
Which is probably true because unless you program a weapons system to care about something (like where it’s going to live after a nuclear war makes the entire world glow in the dark) it won’t worry about the consequences and will start pushing buttons and pulling triggers immediately.
Also: they had a Real Live Human pilot engage in a computer-simulated dogfight against a jet fighter controlled by a computer and the Real Live Human pilot said the computer pilot seemed to think a good way to win the dogfight was to have a head-on, mid-air collision because it wasn’t alive so it didn’t care a whole heck of a lot about dying.
As self-driving Tesla owners have already discovered, computers make mistakes because computers are programmed by humans and humans make mistakes.
Like the time they tried using an electronic strike zone in the minor leagues and any ball that went through a certain area above home plate was called a strike, although they apparently forgot to account for balls that hit the ground first and then went through that area so pitches that bounced three feet in front of home plate were being called strikes.
Oooops.
2001: A Space Odyssey came out in 1968 and way back then a computer wanted to kill Dave the Astronaut because Dave the Astronaut was going to disable the computer and pretty much every science fiction movie ever made warns about technology out of control – including all six Terminator movies – and yet we’re still bound and determined to make the same mistake which will result in Arnold Schwarzenegger being sent back to LA from the future to kill Linda Hamilton which is a really dumb move when so many more deserving actors are available.
And if you don’t believe me, just listen to the speeches they give at the Academy Awards.
Jesus H. Christ, the Terminator movies tell us over and over not to do one thing – DON’T PUT THE COMPUTERS IN CHARGE!!! – and we don’t listen and pretty soon we have Semi-Autistic-Mr.-Spock-I-Don’t-Get-Human-Emotions people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and any Analytics Enthusiast you care to name running everything and they give us self-checkout, Sports Illustrated articles being written by AI, NBA games that are limited to threes and dunks and MLB games where everyone walks, strikes out or hits a home run and it’s against team policy to do anything interesting like stealing a base, so mark my words – or at least highlight them – this rush to Artificial Intelligence is going to bite us in the ass and it’s already nibbling.
And for warning what now passes for Humanity, I assume I’m on Back-From-The-Future Arnold’s hit list, unless he decides to kill my mother instead so I’ll never be born, but the joke’s on him; she’s about to turn 99 and if she gets Arnold cornered he’ll want to kill himself because she won’t stop talking about religion and Heaven, which despite her non-stop promotion of Christianity and its many side benefits, she seems oddly reluctant to visit.
But apparently Heaven Can Wait even though she says she’s really looking forward to seeing my dad again, although my dad was married three times so I once asked her what made her so sure she was the wife he wanted to spend eternity with.
I mean it’s Heaven; maybe he’s been shacking up with Lana Turner and my mom’s arrival will be awkward.
OK, I can’t help but feel we’ve gotten a little off-track here and I think we should both blame my mother while she’s still around and a useful scapegoat, but bottom line; we’ve been warned about computers over and over and over, but are still going to screw this up.
On a Tuesday I read about Egypt offering a Peace Plan to end the Hamas-Israel War and after I read about it I thought, “Good luck with that” and started drawing the cartoon you just looked at and 24 hours later read about Israel starting a new offensive so I’m pretty sure I got this one right.
When the Republicans were busy lying about Donald Trump not losing the 2020 election, Rudy Giuliani did his part and defamed two Georgia election workers, but then lost a lawsuit for doing so and got ordered to pay them $148 million in damages which is almost enough to get Shohei Ohtani to come by your house and mow your lawn.
Giuliani said he didn’t have that kind of money and declared bankruptcy.
According to the Associated Press, Rudy estimated he had assets worth $1 million to $10 million which seems kind of vague, even for a dumbbell. And just in case you want to quibble with that “dumbbell” description, Giuliani repeated his lies about the election workers after he lost the lawsuit so they sued him all over again.
The Slow-To-Learn-His-Lesson Giuliani also faces lawsuits brought by two voting machine companies and another by a former lawyer who said Rudy hasn’t paid his legal bills and another by Hunter Biden for stuff too complicated to explain and another by a former employee who says Rudy owes her $2 million in unpaid wages and – BTW – coerced her into sex and another by a man who says Rudy defamed him after the man slapped him on the back and said, “What’s up, scumbag?”
Rudy accused the back slapper of hitting him and said the slap on the back felt like being shot or struck with a boulder, a description that indicates Rudy doesn’t have a clue what either of those things actually feels like.
That, or the man was Bruce Banner halfway through his transformation into the Incredible Hulk.
In any case…
It would appear that Rudy Giuliani has brought a lot of this on himself and asking for pity because he’s now broke is pretty much like killing your parents and asking for leniency because you’re now an orphan.
Considering everything we have to look forward to in the coming year – another Trump campaign, climate change causing rogue ocean waves to hit Reno, Nevada, social media misinformation that includes hot Asian women telling me I seem like an interesting guy and would I friend them on Facebook and DM them my bank account numbers, people finally getting an excuse to let their antisemitism to the surface (which helps explain why all these people who never gave a rat’s ass about a Palestinian homeland suddenly care passionately) and possibly getting sucked into a war we didn’t start (that’s about all I had room to draw, but feel free to imagine the disaster of your choice) – I depicted a reluctance to enter 2024 and deal with all the bad stuff waiting for us.
Nevertheless…
Happy New Year.
A coworker was telling us she had lunch at one of the casinos over the weekend and they had robots serving the food. That's a little too weird for me, thanks. 😆 "No onions? ... I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."
Believe it or not, one of the most rabid anti-abortion protester in Kansas City is a guy named Max Langston whose career is in weapons engineering. He got really annoyed with me a couple weeks back on the sidewalk in front of Planned Parenthood where he blares at patients through a speaker system ("Good morning ma'am, my name is Max, and I'd love to help you this morning, please don't murder your little baby," blah blah blah) when I told the same patient through my own amplified system that Max just wants to make sure there are some people left for his weapons to annihilate. 🤣