Nuclear war now seems a matter of not if, but when: the bulletin of atomic scientists now has us at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest to extinction ever.
It was the integration of AI into nuclear warfare command and control, as well as AI ability to create brand new biological threats, that led to the most recent change in the doomsday clock.
Now that a robot can beat the best human at table tennis, it won’t be long before robot armies are built. When combined with an exponential rate of increase in the abilities of artificial intelligence, we may see an artificial brain, a hundred times smarter than the smartest human, controlling an army of agile robots.
We read a lot about global warming, which takes place over a hundred or even hundreds of years, while equally formidable threats are here now. Being a master of propaganda and knowing everything about everybody, the AI will also know which humans it can bribe and control and it will outsmart us at every turn: just as it already easily escapes from our best efforts at containment.
Peter Olson, Goonengerry
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. 
