What’s scary about computers.

For the most part I just don’t think about it, but every once in a while I do think that computers are scary. It usually happens when I realize what they’re capable of and how stupid some people are. A few months ago I read a story about some swiss artists who programmed a computer to go onto the dark net and buy something at random with a budget in bit coin. It ended up buying fake passports and drugs and stuff and there was a big how to do with the police. Anyway, I think that (surprisingly) The Last Question outlined exactly what scares me so much about computers/robots. It isn’t a particularly scary story because in it humans somehow manage to evolve alongside with Multivac and live harmoniously. The scary part for me to think about is that Multivac upgrades itself into a freaking god. At a certain point the humans are no longer even capable of comprehending the inner workings of Multivac, who always just creates its own successor. We just created something that we then sort of have to trust that it’ll be nice to us because we can’t do anything about it if it isn’t. Sometimes I just think that we might be moving too fast for our own good. What if things get out of hand because we build something that is more powerful than we can imagine and then don’t think it through all the way with its programming? Like what if it were the future and the art experiment was to have some kind of robot buy crap from the dark net and use it and there was some robot running around with illegal automatic weapons and high on crystal meth? That’s a pretty light example and it doesn’t sound super likely, but there are some dumb people out there.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *