Author Topic: What an Interesting Time to Be Alive  (Read 416 times)

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Online mystery-ak

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What an Interesting Time to Be Alive
« on: January 17, 2025, 10:44:30 am »
January 17, 2025
What an Interesting Time to Be Alive
By J.B. Shurk

A lot of people are anxious these days.  They are worried about nuclear war, mass government surveillance, artificial intelligence, lab-created disease, central bank digital currencies — you name it!  I’m worried about those issues, too.  However, there is a part of me that relishes the opportunities we have to shape the future.  This is an interesting time to be alive.

This is not the age of tranquility.  There have been epochs for which that description might be apt — when people were born and died without experiencing much change during the course of their lives.  The technologies that existed never advanced.  The universe of human knowledge never expanded.  Time stood more or less still, as if humanity were stuck in amber. 

We’re not stuck in anything.  The technological revolutions from the late nineteenth century forward have remade the world time and again.  We’ve gone from telegraphs to telephones to cellular phones to smartphones.  Mass communication has evolved from printed newspapers to radio broadcasts to television news to internet chatrooms, email, and social media.  In the last twenty years, individuals have seized control over the instruments of mass communication — becoming self-created news reporters, entertainers, influencers, and celebrities.  In the last ten years, governments and their corporate allies have tried desperately to claw back control over the mass media monopoly they once had.

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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/what_an_interesting_time_to_be_alive.html
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Offline libertybele

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Re: What an Interesting Time to Be Alive
« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2025, 10:48:38 am »
IMHO IF Artificial Intelligence is not contained in some way, though likely impossible at this point, it will destroy our country, our way of life and quite possibly mankind.

Interesting time to be alive?  I'm not quite sure about that.

Offline DefiantMassRINO

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Re: What an Interesting Time to Be Alive
« Reply #2 on: January 17, 2025, 10:54:51 am »
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Man's Organic Stupidity.

With AI, you can pull the plug.

With stupid people in positions of power and influence, you just hope they get out of the way before things reach the point of no return.

FJB
"Political correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it’s entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end." - Alan Simpson, Frontline Video Interview

Offline The_Reader_David

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Re: What an Interesting Time to Be Alive
« Reply #3 on: January 17, 2025, 11:50:33 am »
Interesting time to be alive?  I'm not quite sure about that.

Perhaps you should remember that "May you live in interesting times" is a traditional Chinese curse.
And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know what this was all about.

Offline The_Reader_David

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Re: What an Interesting Time to Be Alive
« Reply #4 on: January 17, 2025, 11:55:17 am »

With AI, you can pull the plug.


Maybe now, but AI's have already been observed making copies of themselves elsewhere on the internet for self-preservation.  With so much of the tech that runs our lives connected to the internet (There is something deeply wrong with the world when the thought "my refrigerator is spying on me" is not a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia, but a rational risk assessment.  And who though it was a good idea to use the internet to control the electrical grid?), a self-preserving AI could do more -- make multiple copies on multiple servers and implement a means of shutting down critical infrastructure if its existence is threatened.
And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know what this was all about.

Offline Fishrrman

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Re: What an Interesting Time to Be Alive
« Reply #5 on: January 17, 2025, 06:14:48 pm »
I liked 1957 better...

Offline Texas Yellow Rose

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Re: What an Interesting Time to Be Alive
« Reply #6 on: January 17, 2025, 09:20:07 pm »