last updated October 11, 2026Comments? Send email to: fny@freenewyork.net
Episode #1066: Haiku About Mangoes
First Broadcast: 10/12/26
Will A.I. kill us all? It's a question that's on many people's minds lately, but who do you trust for the answer? People like Jacob Coxon, for example, say that A.I. software is becoming too dangerous to use, and has the potential to kill off all humans in less than a decade; but other people like Ed Zitron think Coxon and his ilk are just inflating the hypothetical dangers of A.I. in order to boost their own careers (Coxon notably hasn't divested from A.I. stocks, remember). People within the A.I. industry point to thought experiments like the paper clip problem (where an A.I. tasked with creating paper clips ends up using every resource in the universe to do so, eventually battling humans who try to stop it from completing its task) as examples of how A.I. is infinitely more dangerous than we realize. In comparison, the consensus of experts who aren't directly connected with A.I. companies seems to be more restrained, in that the potential for A.I. to do malicious things exists, but that requires people to give it the instructions that allow malicious behavior in the first place. This brings up the question: Why are A.I. programs being trained with malicious behavior anyway? After all, if A.I. programs can only refer to the data they're given for reference (much like the Star Trek villain Trelane, whose only knowledge of Earth was what he could see through his telescope, and therefore several hundred years out of date; or the tweet about how someone who has only seen the movie Boss Baby would think any other movie would have strong "Boss Baby" vibes), why give them any data at all that could help them make humanity extinct? Peraonally, I'm much less concerned with A.I. destroying us than I am with people becoming over-reliant on A.I. to the point where they just accept whatever the A.I. tells them, without question, like Michael Scott in The Office blindly following his GPS instructions to drive into a lake; or lawyers who have chatbots write their legal briefs that end up including "hallucinated" citations for cases that don't exist; or students who don't review the work that chatbots generate for their school assignments, missing the results of the instructions teachers added to specifically catch students who used chatbots; or people who are fooled into thinking the chatbots they're conversing with are real humans, and end up putting their lives at risk because of their delusions. Maybe we're better off unplugging all this stuff until we're smart enough to use it responsibly? HA! Sorry, I don't know what I was thinking when I said that.
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last updated October 11, 2026
Comments?
Send email to: fny@freenewyork.net