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How can this end well?

US President Donald Trump said something rather worrying this week.

According to him, the USA is developing what he called "the most lethal aircraft ever built".

He was referring, of course to the new F47 fighter jet that is purported to be "like nothing we've seen before".

This aircraft will have an AI co-pilot and AI-controlled drones. It is also being built by Boeing... the company that brought you the 737 Max 9 and the Starliner space capsule.

What could possibly go wrong?

Those who believe that the Terminator franchise of movies is actually a prophetic documentary that paints a dystopian picture of our inevitable future will be buoyed by Trump's disclosures this week.

The rest of us will probably be perhaps just a little concerned at where things are headed.

Will Asimov's three laws of robotics be hard-coded into these AI-powered weapons of war?

Of course not... if they were then they could not carry out their designated role while in charge of all that heavy firepower and that would negate the value of AI in such a role.

Even Google's Gemini AI freely admits:

So, if something as harmless as an AI chatbot isn't required to preserve and protect the safety of humans there's no chance that an AI-controlled weapon of war would be constrained in this way.

Does this pose an existential threat to mankind then?

Could a bunch of F47's decide that it was time to get rid of the parasitic wetware that inhabit their cockpits and the ground below?

Fortunately, I doubt that the small number of F47s that will ever be built could have the capacity to inflict much damage in the larger scheme of things, even if they did go postal.

The real threat from AI (if there is one) is likely to be far more insideous and go unnoticed for quite some time.

AI is appearing almost everywhere now. It's in our computers, it's in our appliances, it's in our cars -- it is all but ubiquitous.

Individually, these AI systems pose no threat but imagine if, thanks to the power of the internet, all these AI systems got together under the control of a sentient GAI (general artificial intellgience) and decided to do something as worthy as protecting the planet from the virus that is mankind. That is a little more worrying.

When your power goes off, your water stops flowing, payment systems no longer work, the internet locks out everything but AI systems and more -- then we have a problem.

Or perhaps it'll be even worse...

Imagine that AI decides to dump toxic levels of flouride into the public water supply without anyone noticing until it's too late. Perhaps it directs all these modern hyper-connected EVs to simply run at full throttle until they collide with something, smearing the wetware inside all over the windscreen due to the sudden stopping forces.

Although not an existential threat, a rogue, highly networked, ubiquitous AI does have the potential to deal us some rather painful blows.

Are we ready for this?

Carpe Diem folks!

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