Welcome to the Machine

The building of a massive $100 billion data centre by Microsoft and OpenAI by 2028, perhaps shows a vision of our future.

There will be a specific day in the history books that will define the date that we lost our ability to constrain the rise of AI, and that day will have passed. In our history, humankind has always worked for a living because we need work to give us purpose. We need good jobs that stimulate our brains and motivate us to get out of bed each day.

The bad side of AI will attack us and our societies in ways that our feeble human brains could never conceive of. It could suck all humanity out of our lives and give us little purpose to do anything meaningful. It will control and manipulate every second of our lives. We could become the laziest species on the planet — the human sloth.

The striving for singularity will end this concept of having a purpose for many, and they may look back in anger at the way a few companies forced their desire to control the world on us. Our kids will lack real depth in their knowledge, our graduates will know little more than being able to drive a command line console, and everything that can be automated will be automated. Every nanosecond of our lives will be analysed and targeted for profit and gain.

I can’t say it better than Roger Waters:

Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
Where have you been?
It’s alright we know where you’ve been

There will be no place to hide from the machine. Many will outline smart cars and medical applications for the wonderment of AI, and those that say, “Do no evil”, but in the eyes of a few large companies and, perhaps, two nations of the world, there are dollar signs and world domination on a scale never seen before. some will say it is the pocket calculator all over again, but it’s not; the end game is GAI (General AI) and that makes you redundant!

Please ask your government to regulate AI in its applications and to report on where it is used. We need to invest not just in AI, but in cybersecurity, encryption, trust and auditability. The building of AI before we have even properly built a trusted Internet is a disaster waiting to happen. We have allowed a few companies to spy on every part of our world, and now we aim to aggregate the collected data into one great super intelligence!

I leave you with a vision of our future: