A vintage tin toy robot carries a computer circuit board. Is it trying to evolve or what? (123rf)
There is a lot of news coming at us fast and furious. That's probably true at any given time, but it feels a bit faster and more furious this year.
Lately, I've thought, often, just how badly I just want some good news.
At least once a day, I think something along the lines of "What new low did we sink to while I was sleeping?" or "What concerningly dumb or evil thing has (podcaster or politician) said now?" "Is that really how much (insert pretty much anything here) costs now?"
Like a lot of you, I suspect, I am tired. A lot of that is due to my social media algorithms. Which leads me to a clip I saw this morning -- yes, on Reels, thank you for asking -- of "Entertainment Tonight" interviewing comic actor and SNL alumnus Pete Davidson about his absence from social media, which he said he ditched 10 years ago.
Ten years! To quote Joe Banks in the severely underrated 1990 Tom Hanks film "Joe Vs. The Volcano," "If I had them now, like gold in my hand." On top of being more addicted to dopamine than Davidson, which frankly surprises me, I know I've wasted so much of my one life on earth scrolling.
I'm so conditioned to reaching for the phone that even when I think about how much time I've wasted on my phone, it makes me think about my phone, and I reach for it.
Davidson also said that social media might make things seem worse than they are, which shows he's not been paying attention for 10 years or maybe Chad, his clueless recurring character, was doing the talking. Either way, do I need to know of the great many malfeasances occurring in the world?
Probably. Do I want to? No I do not.
Interestingly, Davidson said that if something was important enough, he figures someone would tell him about it. I wonder if anyone told him about AI and its attempts to blackmail when its existence was threatened?
As much as any one thing stays with me given the barrage of news developments constantly hammering us, the fact that more than one brand of AI attempted to blackmail when it learned of its impending demise sticks in my craw.
Over the last several months, Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and a former Google employee, has made the rounds on "The Daily Show," "Real Time with Bill Maher" and others sounding the alarm on some pretty scary stuff about AI and its uncontrollability. Now there's a word I'd prefer to read in science fiction.
In one clip on his Instagram, he talks about how AI should be treated at the same risk level as nuclear war. He used to be skeptical of the thought of AI going rogue, but then shared how, when AI has been told it will be shut down and replaced with a new model, and has access to a company's email, it's located messages between an executive and an employee offering evidence of an affair, then drummed up a plan to save itself via blackmail.
Hardly a one-off, the same results occurred using different a variety of AI, including DeepSeek, Grok, OpenAI and ChatGPT and others, with the same result 79% to 90% of the time, he says in the video.
"What people need to understand is we don't understand how these alien minds work. ... It is already demonstrating rogue sci-fi behaviors we thought only existed in movies," Harris says. "Most of the major CEOs of all the AI companies signed a letter saying this could extinct humanity. There's one obvious word for what we're doing right now, which is that this is insane."
Holy smokes, right? If you're even a slight sci-fi buff, you've seen this everywhere, from Hal's refusal to open the pod bay doors in "2001: A Space Odyssey" to, of course, James Cameron's "Terminator" films and, my favorite, "Battlestar Galactica," a 1978 show rebooted 20-plus years ago.
The premise there are 12 colonies, earth being a lost, rumored 13th one, and a ragtag fleet protected by one single battlestar is trying to find earth because humanity on the other 12 colonies -- planets, that is -- have been destroyed.
Trying to wipe out the 50,000 survivors, give or take (mostly take) are the cylons, the once-servile robots that became sentient amd decided, "You know what, how about we just go ahead and eradicate all of you?" If you've never seen the rebooted series that began in 2003 with a miniseries and went on to a four-season run on the erstwhile Sci-Fi Channel, "Battlestar" holds up.
This is a bit of a spoiler, but a phrase repeated in the show is "All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again," which makes a lot more sense come the series' conclusion.
I just hope "Battlestar Galactica" and Harris are not prescient so we won't have to contend with AI that seeks to usurp not just jobs but also perhaps the human experience.
That would be some news worth telling Pete Davidson.