Whatever happens, at least Elon WARNED us!

You’re in the nursing home. Which situation would you prefer?

A weary, underpaid and under-educated woman pops in, changes your diaper and hands out your pills while engaging in a brief chat about grandchildren and/or the weather, then rushes out to attend to one of the other thirty old bats she has to tidy up this morning?An attractive, lively and charming young robot pops in, changes your diaper, hands out your pills and sits down for a nice long chat about quantum physics or the Tibetan Book of the Dead while his robotic colleagues attend to the individual quirky needs of the other pampered oldies?

One can fantasise, right? For this month’s Arrest Rose’s Decline into a Vegetable who Coincidentally Grows Vegetables activity, I went to a discussion group on AI. We started off by getting Chat GPT to write a poem. I thought it’d be crap but actually AI’s really great at rhyming doggerel, it turns out. Better than I am, so there goes my career as a doggerel writer. If one of Chat GPT’s descendants can one day write novels as good as mine, I’ll definitely stop writing novels. Would you?

I read a book a while ago where all the men were replaced by sexy, gentle, witty and useful robots. There ought to be something wrong with that but I can’t see what it is, exactly. (I should make it clear here that I mean ‘replaced’ in the same sense as one would replace an old boyfriend with a new one. No murder involved!) Friends say, ‘Yeah but what if men replaced women with robots, like in The Stepford Wives? Wouldn’t you hate it?’ Well, no. I mean, each sex could have exactly what it wanted, then. Who would it harm? No one, that I can see.

‘Yes but how about friends?’, they say. ‘Would you want all your friends to be robots too?’ I can’t see why not (I mean, I’ve already considered replacing my friends with books). Unless perhaps the very difficulty of dealing with Actual People is good for you – a bit like running up hills or doing crosswords. Maybe there’s a virtue in human unpredictability; your friends stand you up sometimes, or get in a snit, or bore you. Keeps you on your toes. Maybe there’s something bracing – similar to cold baths in the morning – about being bored. Or is there?

Anyway, Elon Musk claims he’s been going around warning everybody who matters from the President down that AI is going to overtake us and that when it does – five years tops – humans will no longer be in charge. And THEN, instead of hovering at my bedside in the nursing home, keeping me alert and hygienic, probably the AI of the future will decide that the cheapest and easiest way of alleviating my suffering is to end it once and for all.

Do we agree? Do we even care? If you had a robot dog, would you kick it?

Anyway I’m now looking forward to illegally downloading a bunch of sci-fi AI films to watch – maybe that’s what I’ll do in the nursing home while Mary from the agency is hustling me into my support stockings. Real Humans is the best one I’ve seen so far. Oh, and this is an interview with me (opining about how to be politically incorrect without anyone noticing, among other things) done by Mike of Heartbeat Books Marketing. Mike’s newsletter reviews a whole lot of really interesting books, so it’s well worth subscribing to.