I ran into a friend at a Palo Alto bar the other day. Let’s call him Horace. Horace is a lobbyist for the technology industry at the Pentagon, and he was staring at his martini with the enthusiasm of a man who had just found out the world is ending.
“What’s wrong, Horace?” I asked.
“It’s the computer boys out here in Silicon Valley,” he sighed. “They’ve gone and built a Death Brain that is going to wipe out humanity, and now they want Washington to do something about it.”
“That sounds quite serious,” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. One of their top researchers, a young fella named Jacob, walked away from his unvested stock options just to warn everybody. In this town, we understand giving up your principles, but giving up your stock options? That’s like a Labrador retriever running away from a fallen hot dog on the street.”
“Well, what does the Death Brain do?”
“Right now, it just answers emails and writes bad poetry,” Horace said. “But the companies admitted that they have had to stop the computers from designing biological weapons and missiles for no apparent reason. One of their CEOs, a chap named Dario, wrote a massive essay practically begging the government to force him to stop spending trillions of dollars on building it.”
“That should be easy enough,” I said. “Congress loves stopping things.”
“It’s not that simple,” Horace groaned. “You see, there’s a catch. We asked the Chinese if they would also hit the brakes on their humanity-destroying Death Brain. And Beijing said, ‘No thanks, losers. We plan to keep building.’”
“So, the Chinese are ignoring the warnings?”
“Exactly. And as any good geopolitical strategist will tell you, we cannot afford an Apocalypse Gap. If China is going to build a machine that destroys the world, America has to do it first, just to preserve our competitive edge.”
“It makes perfect sense when you put it that way,” I noted.
“Donald Trump certainly agrees,” Horace said, signaling the waiter for another drink. “A couple of years ago, he was terrified the computers were going to trick us into a nuclear war and the robots were going to murder us in our beds. Apparently, he has had a change of heart.”
“He’s not worried about the Death Brain anymore?”
“Not at all. In fact, he declared the whole AI Apocalypse thing a hoax. The other day, a fellow was giving a big speech about computer chips on a stage, and Trump called him on speakerphone right in the middle of it. He told the crowd that the robots aren’t taking over. He said the people warning about doomsday are just playing into China’s hands.”
“So, what is his plan?”
“To sprint to the finish line,” Horace said. “He announced that whoever wins the Death Brain race, wins the whole thing. He said the only safety guardrail the world needs is a very smart, high-IQ president.”
“Well, it’s too bad Obama can’t run anymore,” I said. “So, what is your lobbying strategy going to be now?”
Horace sighed. “I’m heading up to Capitol Hill to make sure we don’t slow down the computer labs for a single second. If humanity is going to be wiped out by a giant calculator, we have to make sure it’s an American one. But I am also hearing that Congress wants to spend fifty billion dollars to ensure the computers don’t wipe out the human race.”
“That seems like a prudent investment,” I said. “You can never be too careful with doomsday.”
“It’s a complete waste of taxpayer money,” Horace replied, dropping his fork. “Why should Washington pay a machine to do a job we are perfectly capable of doing ourselves?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I admitted.
“Look at our track record,” Horace said proudly. “We have enough nuclear warheads parked in silos to turn the entire planet into a charcoal briquette by next Tuesday. And we built those using slide rules and rotary phones. We didn’t need a super-smart algorithm to cause mutually assured destruction. Just good old-fashioned human paranoia.”
“So, we don’t need a Death Brain to kill ourselves?”
“Exactly. It’s an insult to our own incompetence. We have spent centuries polluting the oceans, melting the ice caps, and fighting trillion-dollar wars over whose grandfather owned which square foot of sand. Now, some Silicon Valley calculator thinks it can waltz in and destroy the globe in an afternoon?”
“It hardly seems fair,” I agreed. “What do you plan to tell the appropriations committee?”
“I will tell them we have to protect American jobs,” Horace said, signing the check. “If the human race is going to be driven into extinction, it should be done the traditional way. By hardworking politicians and generals, not outsourced to a glorified thermostat.”
