Do panic! AI will steal joabs and tamper with my tropes

Well, there ye are. Futurists in the 1950s thought that, decades hence, it would be raining robots. Today, nae-futurists fear that, in just a few years, it’ll be reigning robots.

Dr Geoffrey Hinton, the aforementioned Godfather who headed Google Brain’s research arm, said that, even until recently, leading worriers feared smart robots were 30 to 50 years away. But in just a few years we could be saying: “They’re here!”

The strange thing about this is that we could just stop the research. But we won’t. It’s counter-intuitive not to continue, though arguably it is also counter-intuitive to work towards your own destruction. But, all over the world, scientists are beavering away. Some will be working for good people, some for bad. Some will be loopy themselves.

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Just as liberals make the mistake of thinking everyone’s as nice as they are, a daft wee voice within us says we’ll somehow manage AI responsibly. But what happens when the nutters get a hold of it?

Or as Dr Hinton put it less eloquently: “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”

As things stand, after the development of nuclear weapons, it’s a miracle that we’re still here already. For a while, it looked like detente, principally between the USA and the Soviet Union, was winning out.

That was based on MAD, mutually assured destruction, being a deterrent.Then along came a new generation of nutters: Kim Jong-un in North Koreashire, Vlad Putin in Russia, Alistair Khamenei in Iran. Some of these “world leaders” start out aff their heids, others progressively go mad, perhaps due to drugs prescribed for chronic illness.

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Kim has been nuts since he was knee-high to a nuke. Putin is put oot after being made to look a fool with his rubbish army. Khamenei heads a theological death cult and could happily press the red button while eating a yum-yum.

It’s not clear at the time of going to press to what evil purposes they could misuse AI. But they’ll find ways. Here, in the idyllic, happy West, the first worry was – all together now – joabs. Correct.

You say: “Well, you’ll be all right, ya choob. There’s no way AI could emulate your loopy prose.”

That is a good point, well made. But it’s wrong. God knows, if I can recycle my old jokes umpteen times, so could AI. AI could get me by the tropes. It’s already doing so, to other poor saps, in the laboratory.

The mind-reading malarkey that some twit mentioned earlier involved predicting how a person’s brain would respond to words, then narrowing the options until it found the closest response.

AI could shove a tentacle on ma heid, say “Artificial Intelligence” and suck out my likely response to the subject, even if it might fall short in some aspects: “What is choob?”

To be uncharacteristically honest, even as a self-proclaimed poet-worrier, I’m not running around like Corporal Jones yet.

The key to all this will be the off-switch. Indeed, it would help if we had one of these for Kim, Vlad and Alistair. As things stand, we must trust to the essential decency and smartness of the human race.

Naw, only joking. Your best option is to get out now. Flee the cities. Get into your camper van and head for the hills.

There, we will form into tribes, living off turnips and gathering round to watch the tapestry instead of streaming films. You say: “That’s already in the Green Party’s manifesto.” Good for them. Always knew these Arcadian clots were onto something.

Ziggy Startrump

Didn’t Donny Trump look better in a woolly hat, complete with bobble? Emerging from an aeroplane in Scotlandshire earlier, his ornate quiff had been blown aboot hither and also arguably yon.

It never looks right at the best of times: too manicured to say the least. I say that as someone who admires American men for keeping a decent amount of hair on their heads instead of going down the brutal European route of the shaved cranium.

In America, that is generally reserved for marines and peeps dedicated to killing.

In Europe, nearly everyone’s a football hooligan or Saturday night street fighter who wants to impress the gals, in the belief that they prefer men of thuggish appearance, which scientific anecdote has proven to be broadly speaking correct.

Donald looked much younger in his woolly hat, and quite a decent, ordinary bloke in his jerkin.

It’s my view that he should remake his image every so often if he wants to get on in politics and business.

He should learn from David Bowie. Maybe get a bright red mullet and a streak of lightning down his face.

Mourners will die laughing

The tycoon behind Go Compare’s fictional opera singer is planning a similarly droll promotion of a funeral provider called, er, Dignity. Sir Peter Wood says it could involve “a horse-drawn hearse with horses talking to each other”, in which one says: “He got a great deal, you know.” Maybe the other says: “Aye, but he’s deid noo, ha-ha!”

Follicular folly

Bald people continue to plague society. In Nottinghamshire, one was out shoplifting when he was spotted by cops. So he dived into a barber’s shop. Not unnaturally, the cops found this suspicious. So they apprehended him, and found he’d nicked 16 bottles of hair product from Boots. Chap was clearly having a bad hairless day.

Flantastic fare

According to my researchers, a major royal event is taking place today and, at it, the dish de jour is quiche. Though Gallic inspired and featuring spinach, broad beans, cheese and tarragon, the culinarily sensitive French have complained it’s not a quiche but a tart. As you’ll have seen in the news, the issue has led to much rioting.

Shaggy Dogg story

Last week, we mentioned a Near Death Experience survivor saying he’d been taken to a celestial pub. This week, we read that a clinically dead woman in yonder Yorkshire encountered rapper Snoop Dogg and his posse coming out of the mist to kill her. As we concluded before, death is just the beginning of more ruddy hassle.

Singing out

With a mind on higher things – chips, whisky etc – your correspondent hasn’t watched Eurovision since childhood, when it was the only thing on. However, there are signs that it’s improving, with top researchers reporting a fall in lyrics saying “la la la”. That said, our position remains the same: “La la la: fingers in ears, not listening.”