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A dramatic shift coming?

24 Jan 2025

Sorry to have AI as the topic again today but I think we need to talk.

I watched a very interesting video yesterday from Sabine Hossenfelder.

It's well worth a few minutes of your time to watch this.

Sabine's video hints at the dramatic power and wealth shifts that will accompany the "AI-age" that is about to descend upon us.

The real risk, it might seem, is not that AI will become omnipotent and create an apocalypse of the type portrayed in the Terminator movies -- but that it will see immense amounts of power and wealth concentrated within a very small group of the elite.

This could radically change the world, moving us from a democracy where one of the aspirational goals is to ensure everyone has an acceptable standard of living, literacy and opportunity to a situation where a powerful few dictate to the masses without question or challenge.

Looking at Sabine's video it becomes clear that today's leaders, our elected politicians, are walking blindly into this future. Indeed, they are funding it with taxpayer dollars in many cases.

As has always been the case... it's not the technology we should fear, it's what some people will do with it that is the problem.

While Trump dismantles the mechanisms that were to act as AI-oversight and simply crows on about the huge sums currently being invested, I wonder if he truly realises the journey he's embarking on. Chances are that he doesn't care anyway since, at his age, he's unlikely to be around for the worst of it or perhaps his hubris has blinded him to the risks such a future could hold.

Following on yesterday's column, I predict that the first sign of the dystopia that awaits will be when power is rationed during winter so that the massive server-farms needed to support AI systems can continue to run uninterrupted. People will shiver with cold while the mechanisms that support AI continue to get all the juice they need to continue.

It will be a small thing but, I predict, a portent of much worse to come.

We can also only imagine how hapless politicians will be outclassed by the oligarchy who have massive AI systems at their disposal. They just don't stand a chance -- and nor do we.

Okay, so I've painted a pretty dark picture which may never come to be, however we ought to have this in the back of our minds as just one of the many ways our frantic rush to grow AI without checks and balances might not actually be the best thing for the human race.

Carpe Diem folks!

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