My Monday Rant: The rise of machines against humanity... I am optimistic, humanity will prevail.

Monday, 28th October 2024, as we go ranting again!

I can't believe I left out Lucky Dube in the list of some of my favourite Reggae Artists last week. I know, "some of my favourite" leaves room for flexibility, but he should have been there... he is there in the list! (https://shorturl.at/FaSyr). Amended and moving on to a more thorny topic... and so, as I said before, I am a Manchester United, Kaizer Chiefs and Real Madrid fan. I'll stop right here, because that is the summary of my weekend! As if that was not enough, in the world of Formula 1, the Redbulls of Max (P6) had a 20 secs penalty during the race and Perez (P17) had 5 secs. Not good! My wife said, "What a weekend for you!", and that got me thinking... is she on my side on this? I always thought that statement was celebratory. ??????

Some interesting news this past week; Nvidia's stock market value briefly touched the USD 3.53 Billion in value, surpassing Apple's USD 3.52 Billion. That just fell on my lap, not that I was following either of them. And then, about 2 days later another article also fell on my lap, intriguingly also related to Nvidia; the CEO, Mr. Jensen Huang, made a comment that there isn't a future where AI replaced him, or anyone, at all! Interesting that HE would say that, given his organisation is in the forefront of manufacturing computer chips that are predominantly used for AI. You'd think he would be one of the advocates of AI replacing human beings. I mean, that would only fuel the demand for his organisation's product, the chips. Right? Maybe there is still some humanity and honesty to salvage in Silicon Valley afterall.

I, for one, do not believe that Artificial Intelligence will replace human beings, at all. Granted, there are some jobs that will need less people to do going forward due to AI, but whatever output from such, even if handled by computers, would still need human beings. I possibly have ranted about this before, and I might start sounding like a non-believer in computing evolution, but I promise you, I AM. But, whatever we make of AI and Machine Learning, if the output of such does not make sense to human beings or if it doesn't enhance human life in any form (negatively or positively) then it is pointless. Think about it, whatever you wanna know right now, with time and access, you can find it somehow or somewhere in a computer. So basically, computers already know it all... but none of it is any useful if it doesn't make sense to us, human beings.

And then there is a widespread fear about the rise of machines against humanity, as the machines become wiser and wiser. I'm very pessimistic towards that, or should I say, I am very optimistic that humanity will prevail. For any of that to cause a real threat to humanity, we would have to have solved some of the world's trickiest challenges. One, access to endless supply of energy and possibly renewable; wise as the machines might become, they will always require powering. Two, mass production of these machines - this is a tricky and expensive business. As is, according to Elon Musk, Tesla and Ford, are the only 2 American car manufacturers that have not gone bankrupt; I believe manufacturing wiser machines would be trickier. Three, mining for raw materials and/or recycling the existing ones - the controversies around the mining of such, even for phone manufacturers, should tell you it is not about to be solved now for machines to take over humanity. And the there is still a small matter of rust, wear and tear... and the like. I say we are pretty safe. I do, however worry about privacy as the machines get wiser... but then again, we might reach to a point that what we deem private now will just be public information. Look how much of our private lives is already online in public domains.

As I get on with the week...

Até proxima semana!