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rynlingI'm reading Hillary Clinton's new book What Happened, and so far it makes sense and confirms a lot of what I've read from other sources, but there's one paragraph almost exactly in the middle of the book (location 3336 in the Kindle edition) that made me go What the literal fuck:
For the record, I respect Hillary Clinton immensely, and it's been my impression that the negative reviews of What Happened are extremely mean-spirited and don't reflect the actual content of the book. Still, I got a good chuckle out of this one random paragraph. If I were the sort of person who wrote political fic, I would totally write a story about how Clinton's email server achieves sentience and takes down the current administration. Although honestly, what with the president doing things like making up African countries in a speech to the United Nations, I'm not entirely sure this isn't already happening.
Technologists like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates, and physicists like Stephen Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence could one day pose an existential security threat. Musk has called it "the greatest risk we face as a civilization." Think about it: Have you ever seen a movie where the machines start thinking for themselves that ends well? Every time I went out to Silicon Valley during the campaign, I came home more alarmed about this. My staff lived in fear that I'd start talking about the "rise of the robots" in some Iowa town hall. Maybe I should have.
Okay, um... I'm glad someone is taking this "existential security threat" seriously. I think Mark O'Connell's To Be a Machine paints a much more realistic picture of where we stand with advances in artificial intelligence, but you can't blame grandma for trying, bless her heart. For the record, I respect Hillary Clinton immensely, and it's been my impression that the negative reviews of What Happened are extremely mean-spirited and don't reflect the actual content of the book. Still, I got a good chuckle out of this one random paragraph. If I were the sort of person who wrote political fic, I would totally write a story about how Clinton's email server achieves sentience and takes down the current administration. Although honestly, what with the president doing things like making up African countries in a speech to the United Nations, I'm not entirely sure this isn't already happening.
