Friday, 29 March 2024

The Finishing Line Is In Sight

By Jiminy and By Joseph, I have almost, almost done it. Three more days of posting and I'll have 'spoken' to you every day in March. Incredible. BUT - things could still go wrong. I may develop an extreme case of writer's block before I even finish this paragraph. I may suffer a catastrophic laptop failure that makes it impossible for me to connect to the wi-fi. We may be attacked by a foreign power that launches an ultra-disruptive electromagnetic pulse that takes out Britain's internet entirely. I know those things are unlikely, but still... I'm not going to start celebrating just yet.

Speaking of electromagnetic pulses and things of that nature, I have stupidly spent quite a bit of time in the last few days reading about AI, and its' inevitable journey towards overtaking human intellect and abilities.  I have to say, I found it rather terrifying. I know I can get carried away with my pessimism at times, but it does strike me that it is very likely that our species is only a few months away from being rendered redundant and possibly facing a forced extinction of some kind. And it's not just me - the people involved in the race to complete this thing all seem to have massive concerns about what will happen when we hand over control to it, and yet still they are ploughing on with their efforts. It's already been pointed out to me that things like ChatGPT could already take over the writing of this blog if I asked it to! With 16 years of my scribblings available online, it could read them all in a nanosecond and learn my style of writing and then imitate it flawlessly.
I assure you wholeheartedly though - that is NOT what I'm doing. It would explain how I went from hardly posting in February to posting 40+ days in a row, but that is NOT what happened. I promise.
But then - and this is the worrying issue - how would you even know????

RC 29-3-24

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