Danger: Safety Ahead

The threat from AI is not that it will change the World. It is that it will keep things exactly as they are.

Once upon a time press gangs roamed our coasts, plucking men out of their lives and dumping them with no recourse or appeal into the Georgian Navy. To die of scurvy, starvation, overwork, drowning or if they were particularly unlucky, a cannon ball to the guts. It sounds unbelievable now. But it was perfectly normal during the Napoleonic Wars. Times change. My mum tells me that sometimes, when she was a girl, she would turn up at the Holloway Road Odeon but the smog was so thick you couldn’t see the screen. Of course it seems outlandish to us now, and it’s difficult to even imagine living with such levels of pollution, but for a generation of Londoners it was just part of their lives.

And just as genuine stories of real people from the past seem incredible to us now, it’s sometimes fun to wonder what future generations will consider outlandish, weird and nuts, about the way we live today.

For instance, I have often imagined how my daughter will grow up to tell her wide eyed and disbelieving granddaughter, of a time, back in the 2020s, when she was little, and regular people were still allowed to drive cars.

And her granddaughter will hardly believe her. She’ll say OK Grandma, but surely not in towns where all the people were. And Grandma will say say, Oh yes, right through the middle. And her granddaughter will look horrified and say but they must have been kept separate from everyone, in a tunnel, or behind a wall or something. And she’ll say nope, there was no barrier, the cars just zoomed around the streets, as near as I am to you. And incredulous, her granddaughter say, Did the cars have to go slowly? And Grandma will say, Sometimes they went slowly, but really there was nothing to stop them going as fast as the driver liked. And who were these drivers? Were they specially trained people? No. They weren’t special at all. Anyone could drive a car. Anyone. As long as they passed a test. A test every year? No. Just the one time. They passed one test and then they could drive pretty much whatever they wanted, as much as they liked, as far as they liked, whenever they liked, and wherever they pleased.

And her granddaughter will say that sounds very dangerous. And my daughter will say, Well yes, it was dangerous. And it was also super brilliant, and fun.

I used to think that my daughter’s weird carless future was a long way off. But actually, I now believe it’s just around the corner, in our cities at least. And it might not be my great grandchildren who she delights with hair raising tales of the unimaginable dangers she encountered driving to Aldi for milk and eggs, (You actually ate cow milk and eggs!!! Gross Grandma!!!) but her own kids.

If you are reading this and thinking, yes, but it will just be the same in the future, only by then everyone will be driving electric cars, then maybe.

But I’m not convinced electric cars are ever going to replace petrol. At least not like for like. It’s just not going to happen.

Sure, the government makes all the right noises. Bungs a few subsidies about. But if it genuinely wanted us to swap petrol for lithium ion then it would surely be doing much, much more, like making a concerted effort to roll out some form of standardised, integrated, charging infrastructure. And attempts so far seem half hearted at best.

Electric cars are super expensive, have limited range, weigh an absolute ton, and are inconvenient and slow to charge.

Add in ULEZ zones, Fifteen Minute Cities, 20mph speed limits, age graduated driving licences, and ‘Congestion charges’, which are little more than punitive taxes heaped upon taxes. And it seems that every year the government is working to make driving any form of car, more expensive, less convenient and wholly unpleasant. The aim is clearly to drive cars off the roads.

The sale of petrol cars is set to end in 2030 in the UK. Just seven years!! It seems unlikely that the myriad problems that currently come with electric vehicles will be solved in seven years. Or even twenty seven.

But even if petrol cars receive a stay of execution, the whole driving experience is set to fundamentally change. In fact with the roll out of new technology, it already is.

Insurance companies are already offering discounts for drivers who attach an electronic gadget to monitor their driving. How long until such devices become mandatory for everyone?

Eventually we can expect our cars to be controlled by a computer, in thrall to a safety obsessed central network, which is, in its turn given instructions by some risk intolerant government agency. Restricting us to 5mph in the rain, or refusing to let us drive more than 20 minutes without taking a break for a nap. Then calculating the environmental damage our journey has caused, and billing us before we even get home.

In the future you might be classed as a ‘car driver’, but I doubt you’ll feel much like one.

Every aspect will be monitored, regulated and controlled. It will be like taking all the most insidious aspects of a Central Bank Digital Currency, applying them to motoring, and adding go-faster, or in this case, slower, stripes.

No one is really talking about it yet, but if you step back just a little bit, it seems plain that the age of the personal, autonomous, individual automobile, is coming to an end.

And it’s also pretty clear that if something as world changing, disruptive, personally liberating, economically significant, fun and of course, dangerous, as the motor vehicle were invented today, you and I would simply never ever, ever be allowed to get our hands on it.

Imagine Henry Ford had come up with the Model T in 2022 rather than 1908. Before the first car had even rolled off the production line, some pinch faced EU style regulator would have stepped in and said no, those automobiles are too dangerous, too destructive and too powerful to be allowed into the hands of the little people.

They’ll get drunk and drive them into kiddies, honk the horns at all hours, race them about the place, have sex in them in lay-bys, and dump them in canals. It’s just too risky. Besides, we’ve already got horses. They’re environmentally friendly, they don’t break down, and best of all, poor people can’t afford them, so there’s very little congestion.

And then she would have closed down the factory. And we’d never have got Top Gear.

Our government’s quaking response to COVID showed us exactly how risk averse, unhinged and cowardly those in charge have become.

They overdosed on the precautionary principle, massively overreacted, closed down the schools, shuttered the Health Service and locked everyone in their homes for the best part of two years. (Not you Deliveroo Drivers-you were expendable). All in response to a virus which clearly only targeted the very old, and the very frail.

Maybe that’s why we don’t already have jet boots, robot butlers, space elevators and laser eyes. What’s the point in inventing jet boots when no regulator is ever going to approve them? Why bother with flying cars when they will never ever be allowed to get off the ground?

If those examples seem a little outlandish then fair enough. But clearly the obsession with safety is already blocking progress. Self driving cars are now officially a thing. Not yet good enough for urban traffic, but seemingly plenty capable of driving on the most boring and predictable roads of all, the motorway.

The UK government seems to agree, at least in principle. It has recently allowed self driving cars on the motorways. But only if the driver keeps their eyes on the road at all times.

And just to make sure you don’t kick back and watch an episode of Clarkson’s Farm on your phone while shooting down the M6, they insist there’s a special camera in the car, scanning your eyes, making sure they don’t wander, and rudely snapping you back to attention with an alarm, the moment they do. In which case I have to ask, if you can’t even take your eyes off the road, what is the point of self driving cars in the first place?

They are literally pointless. Like a superhero, who can become invisible. But only when no one is watching.

Of course self driving cars are dangerous. They always will be. No matter how many guidance systems, bumper sensors and radar ears you strap to them. Self driving cars are dangerous. Because cars are dangerous.

Cars are dangerous. Boats are dangerous. Aeroplanes are dangerous. Stairs are dangerous. Maybe eating the red berries is dangerous. Sailing to the horizon is dangerous.

Having babies is dangerous. Who knows what could happen?

(And we even seem to be doing less and less of that).

Everything is dangerous. But since COVID, and our society’s cotton woolled response to it, we are increasingly living in a world where safety trumps utility. Every. Single.Time.

And of course fun, or simple human joy, is on no account, and under no circumstances, to be factored into the equation.

We’re hurtling (carefully-keeping one hand on the guide rail at all times) towards a Zero Risk, Net Zero future. There isn’t a fresh innovation, disruptive idea, or groundbreaking development that the people in charge don’t immediately want to regulate out of existence, legislate into oblivion or tax into impotence.

But why this obsession with safety? This constant urge to protect us from every supposed ‘harm’, whether real or imagined, online or IRL? Surely our bosses just have our wellbeing at heart? Well no. Of course not.

To some extent the triumph of caution over risk-taking is understandable. Just middle managers and politicians, worried about getting the blame for something terrible, and covering their arses. And who can blame them for that?

But mainly, as ever, it’s all about power, and working out the best way for the people who have it, to keep holding onto it, and to stop you and I, from getting any of it.

The Industrial Revolution was an ongoing series of innovations which turned European Society on its head. Suddenly Barons were swapped out for Bosses. The Digital Revolution was a triumph for the Disrupters, it smashed the old corporations and replaced them with new behemoths, Google, Apple, Facebook (sorry Mark Z, but just like ‘The Money Supermarket Super Seven’, ‘Meta’ is never going to happen). Which are more monopolistic and powerful than the old Captains of Industry could have ever dreamt of. That’s a lot of upheaval.

With the Globalist Revolution our governments cannibalised their own entrenched positions by moving power out of the hands of the people, and into the hands of supra national, and unelected ‘independent’ technocratic institutions like the EU, the IMF and the WHO. With the understanding of course that the revolving door would ensure that they, the elites, the very same people, wearing different hats, one day a poacher, the next a gamekeeper, would remain in charge.

These people have learned the lessons of the past. The last thing they will allow is anything genuinely new, disruptive, or genuinely innovative, to threaten their place, at the top of the pile.

The reality is, that by embracing a Safety First future. We are not protecting people from danger. We are protecting the elites from change.

There’s a very good reason to be fearful of AI. But it’s not because it will go haywire, get confused and turn us all into paper clips. AI is not going to become Skynet, because our governments, and the elites who run the tech infrastructure on which we all depend, are already carving out a role for Artificial Intelligence which doesn’t include sending Arnie back from the future, to destroy our present.

Super intelligent AI will be trained to fulfil the same purpose as all the rest of our new digital technologies. To monitor our actions, curtail our speech, and suppress our freedoms. To control populations, predict dissent, and to ‘nudge’ behaviours more efficiently, insidiously and comprehensively than ever before.

And it will all be done under cover of keeping us ‘safe’. To protect us from ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, bad ideas, nasty words, ‘hate speech’, inconvenient questions and any form of unsanctioned (as opposed to sanctioned-there will be plenty of that) prejudice. In other words, to ‘protect’ us from ourselves.

Human agents, at the behest of the elites, are already making sure that current world leading AI like ChatGPT skews their responses to reflect their interests and narratives. There are loads of examples, but one of my favourites, is from the brilliant Rob Henderson.

Ask it the right question and ChatGPT will praise communism and condemn fascism. Saying fascism is nasty and bad, while communism might be OK, it hasn’t really been tried properly yet.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for condemning fascism, but call me old fashioned, I think Mao killing between 40-80million people (recollections may vary) in the name of socialism, also deserves, you know, a mention.

The mistake we are being encouraged to make is to consider AI as somehow ‘independent’ of human oversight. That the real, hideous, world crushing danger lies in its autonomy. When the opposite is true. For most of us, the real danger of AI lies not in its power to manipulate us, but in the openness of its own systems, to be manipulated, by our entrenched elites.

It’s not a future of killer robots we should fear, but a future, nearer than most of imagine, when the power of AI is linked to CBDC, government nudge units, and real time data collection to create a super sophisticated and inescapable system of societal control, like the CCP’s Social Credit System, but not as friendly.

The threat of AI is not that it will change the World. It is that the elites will harness its genuinely awesome powers, to keep things exactly as they are.

We are hurtling towards a future where we are building ourselves ever more sophisticated cages, and calling them safe spaces.

Depressingly, I don’t know if we can do much to stop it happening. But I do know that if we insist on seeing literally everything as a threat, a danger, a risk solely to be avoided, then the only thing we are really in peril of losing, is our own humanity.

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Thanks so much for reading this post. I genuinely appreciate your time.

If you enjoyed it please share, or consider subscribing. It really helps me grow Low Status Opinions.

But what do you think?

Am I being too pessimistic about our AI future? Am I wrong about electric cars?

There does seem to be a war against driving. I have a motorbike which I hardly use these days. It’s just too much hassle.

I’ll try to reply to all good faith comments in kind.

Thanks again. And best to you.