Trust in the Newest World
Asimov, Heinlein, and even Vonnegut dabbled and fiddled with it, marking imaginary time with dreamy hallucinations pressed to paper to the delight of millions. Including me. Nobody that I read anyway could possibly have predicted the weirdness of merging a budding, but quite unfinished world-changing technology with unbridled capitalism. Where there’s money, the watchwords are faster and more, consequences be dammed! Who made this image, and well, who cares? Who sang the song, and then vanished? How do you make a hand – is it five or six fingers? What the hell are ownership, copyright, patents? Does an artist even need fingers? At the current state of AI (“Artificial Intelligence” – an oxymoron if I ever heard one), the above paragraph captures the most apparent issues, but certainly not all. Just as I mused way back when computers got small and light enough to fit on a spacecraft – and of course, a nuclear missile is a spacecraft – running, god help us (in my imagination) one of...