It's a disturbing sign of the times that the global levers of power today are controlled by genocidal murderers, sex offenders, megalomaniacs, war criminals and rapacious billionaires who should all be in jail. Collectively, these psychopaths are driving the human race ever closer to the seventh mass extermination, this time of homo sapiens — which is probably a good thing from a planetary perspective, for we do not deserve this wonderful orb.

Any one of three forces — artificial intelligence (AI), climate change, war — has the capacity to exterminate us, but it gets even worse: the last three years has demonstrated that all these three forces are now coming together to do the job under the guidance of the sociopaths mentioned above.

As we edge ever closer to a war-driven holocaust in Ukraine and West Asia, this three-way synergy is becoming more pronounced and evident. AI is being used to assassinate leaders, military chiefs and scientists, to communicate and surveil, to guide missiles and bombs, to make war itself autonomous. The fate of "enemies" is now being decided by algorithms, not rational persons.

This harnessing of AI for war has been exposed in the tussle between Anthropic and the Pentagon, when the latter refused to accept the guardrails which Anthropic had inserted into its algorithms to prevent their misuse. Anthropic was blacklisted for taking an ethical stand, but Open AI and others quickly filled the void. AI is making even conventional/ non-nuclear wars more lethal and opportunistic/ acceptable for those nations which possess the technology.

This AI is being being used by robber baron warlords,........

© National Herald