Webcurios 18/09/26

Reading Time: 40 minutes WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! Well, of course we are, this isn’t news, but thanks to AI – or at least the imaginary version currently taking up the space left by the Silicon Valley brainworms – it seems that the entirety of the media and political classes have decided to spend the past week proffering (wrong, often spectacularly-ill-informed) opinions on how exactly you get from ‘LLMs that are increasingly impressive but not in any meaningful way close to intelligence’ and ‘a machine that decides to switch us all off because it decides it wants to give the world over to mustelids instead and needs to clear some space’, and how likely that is to happen. Is AI going to kill us all? Well, maybe, but vastly more likely is that we kill ourselves through a combination of different factors, one of which, yes, fine, might be AI. See? ISN’T THAT REASSURING??? I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t want to see the other, earlier version of this intro which I…