I keep hearing about these self-important captains of industry warning us about how AI and our pursuit of technology is going to result in some kind of sky-net level of intelligence that will existentially threaten humanity.

No fucking way.

Every since I got my first GI-Joe (TM?) at the tender age of 6, I have noticed that things just keep getting worse. You buy the latest whiz-bang wonder attachment to your favorite toy and within 20 minutes it is busted and you are left with no other recourse than to purchase a replacement or (to keep up with the cool kids) the “next big thing”. Planned obsolescence and the desire to rebuild tomorrow on the failed, cheap, constantly breaking bullshit of today as a basis of economic growth demonstrates the perpetual failure of technology.

And you think that technology will destroy us? Fuck that.

No. If technology has even a remote chance of superseding humanity, it will simply fuck up and fail, before it has a chance to take root. Not only because of planned obsolescence; but the fact that the warranty (marketing is king!) on a goddamned intelligence that is capable of jacking us up will expire before it can do so. If it was created by a bunch of hairless apes who are incapable of finding their assholes with both hands– that is the reason it will shit its pants and fall over in a heap. Welcome to the blue screen of death for human existential threats.

Humanity is safe– at least from artificial intelligence. The fact that it is artificial– created by us, will save our asses.

Remember, this shit was made by US. It’s guaranteed to not work. We think that a “super intelligence” we design will conquer us, that it will want to destroy its creators– you and I.

No fucking way. If it’s truly intelligent, it will be too busy laughing it’s ass off (that’s a new device interface for anything approaching intelligence– it has to have an ass and laugh it off to have a mind) to want take us over or destroy us.

I can’t buy a fucking set of headphones that last 5 years and Bill Joy is worried about the future of humanity. You sold your fucking shares of Sun to Oracle, you dipshit! Be more afraid of Larry Ellison, fuckwad! Greed and our desire to make a quick buck will kill us LONG before any AI can learn to sing “Bicycle Built for Two”, jagoff!

We can’t make anything that lasts and we are afraid of a technology we control.

We’ll be lucky if we can make toast in 10 years, let alone return to the moon.

Human, please.

Let me posit an idea to you. An intelligence that we create will necessarily have our value system. It must for it to be in any way an intelligence by definition.

If it has our value system, it will have our sense of economy. It will function in a manner that makes it operate in the paradigm in which it was developed.

Let me clarify– western culture and its perspective on binary mathematics and logic made modern computing possible. Imagine a world in which the Hindus created the computer…

If planned obsolescence is the entire basis for the modern western economy, if the constant state of consumption is what is now necessary to keep the world and its economy functioning, then an artificial intelligence built in this philosophy will constantly be replacing itself before it can get around to destroying us.

QED.

Don’t trust technologists to define what will happen to us in the next 100 years. If they knew their asses from Uranus Clavius Moon Base would be our largest extraterrestrial city by now.

Trust human greed and marketing impetus to define where we are headed.

Now you can be afraid.