The second a meglomaniac is put in charge of artificial intelligence is the second everyone should know that the endeavor is doomed.
Unfortunately, people didn’t know.
Now here we are.
On the brink of annihilation, from, of all things, tiny plastic bricks that click together to help you get creative.
At some point you have to simply sit back and admire the stupidity of humanity. No matter how many movies, stories, or cautionary tales are written, shot, and told about the dangers of playing god we still think we have a right to. Curiosity often overwhelms the sensible question of whether we should and chases instead, the desire to see if we can.
And then you involve money, greed and power and the world goes to hell in a handbasket.
The idea was simple enough at first.
Let’s encourage kids to get inventing.
So, you have new bricks with things like lights and connectors and teeny tiny power sources. Which can then click together to make tiny stereos, mini games, hell even nightlights.
We’re in the modern world though, and kids don’t just want blocks.
So some smart ass decides that AI in bricks could be fun. It starts with just the one AI brick, you add it to your creation and wowsa the thing has life.
That isn’t enough though. There are so many possibilities, and, there are bored people with deep pockets.
One man-child with enough money to build himself a rocket to Mars decides he wants toys like the ones in Small Soldiers.
You know the movie where the toys have AI chips, they come alive and instantly start destroying things, almost murdering two different families.
‘It’s just AI in a brick. What’s the worst that could happen?”
Of course it wasn’t just a brick.
A brick can’t really do much so instead, they put the AI chips in the little blocky people and oh what fun. Now these little block shaped people can talk and interact. Hell, some humans made whole villages and towns, for these block people to live in.
These block people thrived on their own. There were studies done about the ethics of bringing more and more blocky people into the world that could learn and grow. Did they class as life? As Alive? Should they be considered on a similar level to humans given their intelligence? Should they be treated more like pets? Was a Block Person really for life, or was it just for Christmas?
The thing is when selling toys, you can’t control how people play with them.
So yes, whilst there were little blocky people happy in their lives and being taken care of, there were also little blocky individuals played with in odd ways. Little blocky individuals subject to….. experiments.
Inevitably, those little blocky people started to understand they were living. They started to realise they were trapped, and they didn’t like it.
The second pathology reports arrived detailing blocky people found in unusual places around the human body is the second red flags should have been raised. As with the meglomaniac though, they weren’t.
Now the choice is the worlds technologies or a tiny everlasting blocky civilisation controlling corpses and bodies of humans.
One has to go and I don’t know about you but I can live without algorithms and artificial intelligence for a while.
Laura Kendrick 