Yeah…ok. I’m an older guy. Not old. Older. [Shut up, Smedley] and I worry. About a lot of things but especially about this mad race to develop AI…and just why the hell it’s all necessary.

I say love – hate because while I love making Photoshop and Lightroom sit up and wag their tails, I’m scared of AI…and worry about ninja super computers, the internet of things and lazy assed people ending all of us with a misplaced line of code , or some angry Goth nerd somewhere in the bowels of a Russian city screwing with the wrong computer, a la “War Games”.

And don’t get me started on greedy idiots willing to sell you and everyone else down the river with shiny gee gaws which promise to make your life “better and easier” forgetting that computers are so bloody minded doing what they’re told to do without stopping to think, “Should I do this or not?”.

Yeah. Asimov’s 3 Laws.

Wanna bet?

Plenty of folks who are [amazingly] more clever than yours truly [and believe it or not you, as well] worry about the same things. Folks like Stephan Hawking, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak and more. So I know this isn’t just old older guy paranoia.

We can’t quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can’t know if we’ll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it. Would those creepy assed machines even care? Would they even ask the question “Should I?”. You can’t get most people to ask that, so why should a machine?

Now they’ve invented Cubic. Marvelous. It’ll connect you to your smart house, all your devices and count calories for you. You like a girl? She has a Cubic? I wonder what the Cubics cook up between them…and I don’t think it’ll be veal parmigiana. If nothing else, we’ll have a new genre of movie: “Boy meets girl meets Cubic meets Relationship-mageddon”, all because Cubic/a get jealous. OK…probably not, but that’s just some comic relief…which is probably unwarranted.

Want to have a conversation with an AI machine? OK...you can do that with Cleverbot. It wants to learn all about you. You might even have had a conversation with it on the phone and never have even known you did.

How do we know whether when they develop more intelligence [what ever that is] than people [probably not as hard as all that] whether a conscience will come with it or whether some genius will decide that would just slow the system down by a micro-pico-nano second.

That’s really what we all need.

How about Daesh meets AI? If you think that’s far fetched, then you also probably believe the airplane you fly in has any sort of protection on its computerized avionics and flight critical software. It doesn’t…any more than your fridge or pacemaker do.

So, by all means: Get a Cubic.

Maybe a better idea would be for humanity to extract its head from its collective butt, get a conscience and a life, some balls to tell the corporate G*d to eff off, learn to live non-destructively on this mud ball we call home and stop this insane gallop to a dreadful end.

When I go to meet my maker, I don’t want it to look like a bored Terminator. Anything but that. Please.