Seems to me that we’re all a pack of lemmings heading off the cliff with eyes open but something in us diminished.

Was this stage of insanity buried within our evolutionary game plan?  When people finally become frantic is a bloodbath inevitable? Shut my mouth–or break my pen–or my keyboard, this isn’t being helpful, I fear.  But no, those who know better say that there’s no game plan, just something called emergence.  I wouldn’t mind emergence so much if it didn’t appear to be from down below (metaphorically speaking), where the fires are kept burning. Since science questions the existence of the Akashic Records, there’ll be no one to ever know.  Some say the cockroaches may survive–whoopee.  Giddyap, Archie!

NO JOKING MATTER, so why do I joke?  (You can’t see my tears.)

‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm.

Just in case you didn’t visit this Zinger–a brief exerpt: (Click on the blue for the source)

Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.

His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”  [Duh, ya think?]

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

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I think I’ve reached the bottom of my barrel.  I’m not singing if you see me coming better step aside, but maybe I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch…

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Henceforth I’m going to try and limit this blog to light trivialities.  Let’s see how long that (I) can last….