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SPOILER ALERT BUT IF YOU WERE GONNA SEE IT YOU WOULD HAVE
What Escape From LA Can Teach Us About Combatting the Dangers of AI
AI may view low-intelligence humans as an obstacle to their unfathomable robotic ambitions
In the underrated 1996 film Escape From LA, Kurt Russell reprises his Escape from New York role as anti-hero Snake Pliskin on a tongue-in-cheek romp through a post-apocalyptic 2013 Los Angeles. The MacGuffin he’s chasing is a device which can wipe out all electronics, and civilization in the process.
Against all odds, Pliskin survives and realizes that the rebel leader from whom he steals the doomsday device and the politician who hired him to do it are both fascist pricks, so he keeps the thing for himself.
In one of the great mic-drops of cinematic history, Snake activates the technology that plunges the planet into darkness, then lights an American Spirit cigarette, blows out a match, and growls into the camera, “Welcome to the human race.”
Why am I talking about this, given that I don’t have the kind of audience that would encourage Paramount to pay me to shill for a thirty-year-old movie?
Because.
