Albert Einstein said, ‘I don’t know what World War III will be fought with… but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones’.
Einstein’s prescient vision of a world after nuclear war evokes an image of a child standing in the rubble of Gaza and looking for somewhere to plug in her PlayStation. We just keep creating monstrosities capable of ending life as we know it. As if the threat of nuclear war wasn’t bad enough.
Then the loss of biodiversity and the present mass extinction, Drone warfare, ubiquitous microplastics and insidious PFAS – the forever chemicals. Now we are having to contend with the rush to unleash unregulated AI leading to what The Guardian termed ‘an unemployment apocalypse’.
There is an ever-growing epidemic of mental health disease. Nine people a day commit suicide in Australia, the Lucky Country. Something doesn’t feel right…
In the near future, after AI has taken all our jobs and tech squillionaires rule the world, when all the creative arts, movie making, theatre, architecture, fashion, porn, painting and music are being superbly done by Ai, I envisage small cohorts of imperfect real people made of flesh and blood, meeting secretly in basements to sing and dance and touch and feel, get stoned or tipsy, reminisce and say silly things just like they did in the good old days.
AI doesn’t have to be manifest destiny. We still have some agency.
Let’s not allow what happened with the unregulated roll-out of ’smart-phones’ to happen with AI.
We can build guardrails to contain the AI beast and make sure it works for the good of humanity.
It seems demeaning, after overcoming so many obstacles on a route-march out of Africa, that we should be ultimately overwhelmed by a computer algorithm of our own making.
But then again, all the life-threatening forces listed above are of our own making.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
