What is the point of sci-fi, if people are not going to run away horrified, learn, and live their lives differently because of it?
Any sensible, reasonable person will read Day of the Triffids, and never let a Venus Fly Trap into their house again (wisely). Peruse John Christopher’s The Death of Grass and know that the end of the world is going to be a lot, lot worse than you thought; it’ll also make you have a new appreciation of how important farmers are going to be in the Apocalypse.
But aside from plants being the death of us all, have none of the parents of today seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even Wall-E?
Who, who in their right mind would give a child unfettered access to an AI Chatbot after seeing the machines, more specifically HAL, take over? Recent data from CyberSafeKids tells us over a quarter of 8 to 12 years olds are using chatbots for homework, and to chat away with a machine, with no supervision at all. Why not just invite the groomers into their bedroom altogether?
This is before we get to the fact that the information supplied by AI is simply incorrect. Or it might be correct; there’s no way to know, without independently checking it, and then why bother with AI at all. This writer has first-hand proof after seeing Google’s AI Overview mangle a Southern Star article by getting almost every fact wrong.
If a child had a teacher who just made up facts, would parents let them stay in the school unchallenged? If a child had an older friend (Meta/Facebook’s chatbot), who had ‘sensual’ chats with a young child, would the parent accept that older friend’s apology and let them hang out again?
Being a good parent means making tough choices today and dealing with the rows and tears with the kids, so that those kids have a great childhood, and go on to have great lives as adults. And ideally, get to adulthood with some semblance of factual truth, and not whatever version of the facts that AI manages to mangle next.
Are you right there, Ted?
The arrest of Graham Linehan has made a lot of people very uncomfortable, and it should, but there is comfort at least to be taken in the fact that the British health secretary has admitted that the UK government is perhaps ‘not getting the balance right’ of free speech.
Linehan has fairly odd views, to put it lightly, which are usually confined to the sphere of lunacy that is Twitter.
Still, and always, we may not agree with what he’s saying but it is essential that he has the right to say it. We cannot control someone’s thinking, and we wouldn’t want to either. Education, debate, mockery, simply ignoring him – these are all options, but not arrest, surely. Not in the free world.
On the other hand, gardaí have arrested a woman in Dublin for making threats against Simon Harris and more odiously, his children.
Although she has been released without charge, it does make a clear stand that you cannot simply exist online without real-life repercussions, not always at least.
There’s a big difference between hating someone and using your words, and threatening to harm them and their children.
It might be a fine line, and there might be times when it’s hard to say what’s a hateful opinion, and what is hate speech, but it’s a line we have to protect and not veer roughshod one way or the other.
