21st Century Wire says…
Throughout our media and film productions, there is this almost macabre fawning of future technologies and the corresponding technocracy they will bring. It’s as if technology is omnipotent and all-pervasive, and only a fool or an anathema would dare stand in the way of the inevitability of ‘progress’.
Jay Dyer writes, “It is not by accident or an organic, “grassroots” trend that numerous films coming out are focused on artificial intelligence and the transhumanist takeover.”
“In order to transition to the synthetic overlay that will integrate SmartCities, the “Internet of Things,” human bio-engineering, cloning, biometrics, genetic programming and environmental engineering is now an open plan in numerous transhumanist lectures and publications. Yet in order to reach this phase, experimentation is necessary, and what better means to that end than experimenting on populations en masse. We have already seen in my discussions and analysis the technocratic establishment has no qualms about testing on unwitting subjects, so covert experimentation on mass populations is not without precedent.”
Now, one of the godfathers of the computing revolution has broken ranks to issue a dire warning about what artificial intelligence has in store for the human race…
Apple co-founder on artificial intelligence: ‘The future is scary and very bad for people’
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The Switch
The Super Rich Technologists Making Dire Predictions About Artificial Intelligence club gained another fear-mongering member this week: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Wozniak joined original club members Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk by making his own casually apocalyptic warning about machines superseding the human race.
“Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people,” Wozniak said. “If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they’ll think faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently.”
Doling out paralyzing chunks of fear like gumdrops to sweet-toothed children on Halloween, Woz continued: “Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don’t know about that … But when I got that thinking in my head about if I’m going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines … well I’m going to treat my own pet dog really nice.”
Seriously? Should we even get up tomorrow morning, or just order pizza, log onto Netflix and wait until we find ourselves looking through the bars of a dog crate? Help me out here, man!
Wozniak’s warning seemed to follow the exact same story arc as Season 1 Episode 2 of Adult Swim’s “Rick and Morty Show.” Not accusing him of apocalyptic plagiarism or anything; just noting.
“Any smaller than that, and scientists will need to figure out how to manipulate subatomic particles — a field commonly referred to as quantum computing — which has not yet been cracked,” Quartz notes.
Wozniak’s predictions represent a bit of a turnaround, the Financial Review pointed out. While he previously rejected the predictions of futurists such as the pill-popping Ray Kurzweil, who argued that super machines will outpace human intelligence within several decades, Wozniak told the Financial Review that he came around after he realized the prognostication was coming true.
“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” Wozniak said, nearly prompting me to tender my resignation and start watching this cute puppies compilation video until forever.
“I hope it does come, and we should pursue it because it is about scientific exploring,” he added. “But in the end we just may have created the species that is above us.”
In January, during a Reddit AMA, Gates wrote: “I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence.” His comment came a month after Hawking said artificial intelligence “could spell the end of the human race.”
British inventor Clive Sinclair has also said he thinks artificial intelligence will doom humankind. “Once you start to make machines that are rivaling and surpassing humans with intelligence, it’s going to be very difficult for us to survive,” he told the BBC. “It’s just an inevitability.”
Musk was among the earliest members of this club. Speaking at the MIT aeronautics and astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium in October, the Tesla founder said: “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.”
MORE READING:
Elon Musk: Human-driven cars may be outlawed because they’re ‘too dangerous’
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