A friend messaged me in a flap the other evening, an angst-ridden plea for a virtual hug in an age of malicious bots and fickle friends and social media-induced insecurity. Wtf, she said.
Seems she’d put something horrible about Elon Musk on Facebook. Someone she’d thought was a friend dissed her “post”, saying: “I LOVE Elon Musk!!!” Can you believe it? Doesn’t he know Musk is a twat, she asked in despair? Don’t we all know?
No less an authority on the twatness or otherwise comes to us from the Great Twat himself, Musk, the former South African whose one-man crusade against woke-ism led to his buying Twitter. To set it free.
I felt bad for my friend. I tried to cheer her up by joking there is a place for white South Africans who’ve left because being here would crimp their style. And preclude them from becoming the masters of the universe they were born to be. That place is Mars. She seemed consoled.
I couldn’t help but wonder about her friend’s fawning endorsement of Musk, a dodgy character all round, and whether this was inspired by the prevalent white South African male view of him as a reprimand to our society, in particular the race-driven remedies and practices seen to be at the root of our problems.
Put simply, Musk is portrayed as the comic (sorry, cosmic) genius who got away. If we were just a bit nicer to whites, as a society, he might have stayed. A common subtext.
He is offered as proof of everything wrong in our country, hence the Schadenfreude, in which his absence and apparent success is held up as evidence that we’re not fit and proper for real thinkers and doers like Musk. We’re second grade.
Secretly, too, he is for white South African men, testimony writ large that they are not yet entirely irrelevant.
If only we had a system that encouraged boorish rocket scientists with Stone Age ideas to stay instead of seeking their fortunes in countries where they don’t have load-shedding, red tape and BEE. Then we too could be sending rockets into orbit, from a pleasant little pad in Klapmuts.
Musk could’ve been running Eskom if we’d stopped him at the airport.
But he’s gone forever. He’s become the master of the world of rocketry, artificial intelligence (AI) and a limitless range of potty ideas. A Howard Hughes for the age, a mad aviator who proudly displays rather than hides his consuming delusions.
This week, he was co-author of a letter in which he claims AI has got out of hand now. It’s threatening the future of the entire human race. Ag no, the horror!
Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no-one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.
— Elon Musk
“Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources,” says Musk, the master of the reckless gesture on a grand scale.
“Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no-one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.” Not even their creators! A spine-chilling prediction to say the least, a (reusable) bombshell of dispiriting tidings.
The thought of the planet without people, the proverbial human tree falling unheard in the forest, should serve as a huge wake-up call and easily beats Greta Thunberg’s wildest dreams of annihilation. Yet, being humans, expect us to hit the snooze button on this one. I have.
Among other remedies Musk recommends to save us from robots cleverer than ourselves, is state intervention, to halt new ideas and staunch the flow of creativity. Without this, he warns, “it’s quite dangerous technology”.
How Musk must be regretting he left South Africa, where the dull and sure hand of the developmental state would have stopped AI in its tracks years ago, waiting for endless permits and permissions only to find the Guptas had stolen the patents anyway.
Now, potentially mostly unemployed and bullied by bots, we prepare to meet our maker as a defeated species, outwitted and flat-footed by AI, let down and left exposed by a glaring lack of regulation and red tape. Good news in the interim for us in South Africa, though. It seems most menial jobs are safe.
Bad news is that lawyers and journalists are at risk in the new age, and the moment Musk and his friends find a bot mean-spirited and expedient enough, that’ll be the end of the dark arts of human litigation and hype. And the human race will have to battle on best it can without us.
Could it be that Musk is trying to alarm us into joining the queue for Mars, where we’ll have to listen to him um and ah in lost-cherub style, smoking a cigar and reminiscing about the 20-hour workday back on Earth?
I’m not sure who has been pencilled in for the first junket: Musk has to go, obviously, and you’d want a window seat for Julius Malema, already suited up for volcano-taming on the red planet. Throw in Helen Zille, to add an immigrant’s vigour to this experiment in intergalactic colonialism. And possibly loudmouth itinerant businessman Rob Hersov, describing himself as “pleasantly surprised” after his recent visit to Orania. To record the foray, who better than the so-human journalist, Piet Rampedi, whose “exclusive” on the Tembisa decuplets is exclusive to this day? What bot could compete?
Three cheers then for human ingenuity and the survival of the species. Have a great trip, guys. And thanks, Elon, for the heads up about the risk and indignity of being ruled by an intelligence greater than our own.
We can’t say we haven’t been warned.
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