fire in a box and the digital holy war

burning down the digital cathedral: why i think ai is basically just fire in a box

yo so i was thinking about ai (artificial intelligence, not alcohol industry wisdom) and it hit me like a ton of bricks: this is just fire in a box lads. yeah you heard me fire. the same fire that cooked our ancestors' mammoth-meat stew and set all those roman temples on fire (metaphorically!) at least that's what i ASSUME happened in 753 bc when rome was founded. who remembers this stuff?? anyway

remember when fire was groundbreaking? me either, but apparently humans got way too excited. like one day you wake up and bam there's fire just wherever you look. smoke in the air, animals running amok, romans building thermoprostil buildings for no reason. the first people to discover it were like 'wow this is wild,' and the second people were already trying to put it out. we never learn yeah

so now we're setting digital churches on fire (metaphorically again!) because people LOVE new tech. just earlier this year some bloke at google was like 'matthew, the ai you've built is sentient.' and i was like 'mate, that's just my toaster who keeps trying to run away.' but no one listened. instead every startup from silicon valley to siberia is putting their own digital cathedral on the pyre. and honestly the monks (the programmers) are just shrugging because they got dynamite in their hands and nobody checked the safety deposit box

ai is basically just cooking with dynamite now and no one's talking about it. they're like 'burt, you're wild' but point of view imagine if carly from accounts had access to AIs that could write emails and also set things on fire. she'd launch a thousand rockets...or maybe just burn down the database. same difference. this is how civilizations end, my friends

end with a solid take that we should respect fire this time (or just keep burning shit) yeah. honestly i think we've become too sentimental about technology. with fire you had to know how to use it properly - sometimes you get burned, sometimes you cook a nice chicken. but with AI we're just handing it over to the robot dog from down the street and saying 'mate, do your thing.' this is why i'm pro-ashes now. we need to respect the original incendiator (fire, not travis scott) or we're doomed. actually, wait...

for real though, the best way to handle this is with respect. respect fire, respect each other, respect the fact that tbh we've been doing this for thousands of years and we're still not good at it. or just keep burning things and figure it out later. either way, see you at the digital bonfire.