West World, which i'm pretty sure i wrote in a parallel universe (best work i ever did by far!), does the car thing very well. If you're wanted by the police, then your car simply pulls over, locks all doors & shuts down.

This is precisely what can be done with central bank digital currencies (CBDC). Wanted? Whatever currency you have can be frozen immediately.

The other point is that although the rise of AI appears to be happening suddenly, the creators of Chat-GPT didn't invent it overnight. Presumably, it's been in development for quite some time.

That's right, and I've wondered if they kept this development out of the public view for so long because they were scraping all our data without our permission.

I suspect that was a large part of the motivation in covering Covid up. If it gets out that The Experts fucked-up & caused Covid, then people are going to start questioning what the fuck else are they up to? That would put all these grand plans into jeopardy.

Well, yes, and there's that! They have to maintain the untouchable nature of the Experts, don't they. Had the true nature of the Covid origin been exposed, then all the big projects would be vulnerable, particularly covid vaccines, for starters. How could we trust those who unleashed this upon us, intentionally or not, to give us a vaccine? They caused it, after all.

The tragedy of all this is that our ability to practice science is, of course, a very good thing. Vaccine science is a good thing. But the arrogance of some of these players jeopardizes the standing of science in the public eye. It's a total fuck up.

I don't think it's going to happen, but now is the time to press pause on AI's rise, work out some ground-rules, deal with the ethics questions that you raised - kinda like the US's Founding Fathers did - hammer out some simple guidelines. No good saying 'we'll cross that bridge when we come to it' - AI is coming to us - it's now or never.

No, that's not going to happen. There will be no pause. It's a race, after all. Who pauses in a race?

As we've said, AI is not inherently bad, & there will be a day when it throws off human-handlers altogether, but it's that interim period that worries me, when humans are still directing it.

So happens that it's this interim batten-change period - in the entire history of earth's creation, bio-life, consciousness - that we are living in the thick of ... (or it's a game simulation already & this is the final chapter)

And this gets back full circle to the question of where will this lead. I'm afraid AI will promote and support fascism. Fascism seems to be on the rise around the world, albeit in different forms. We have China, which needs no explanation. We have Christian Nationalist movement building in the US. Fascist-like people are winning elections in Europe. Russia needs no help in that regard. And AI is only going to help these centralized movements.