If it’s not a fact, it’s common sense: Gunmen kill gunmen. Anecdotal evidence piles up, most recently in Oregon. If guns proliferate, more bad men with guns will be stopped and killed.
And more bad drivers will get shot in road rage incidents and more innocent folks will get accidentally whacked by a stray bullet.
Left-hemispherics kill prudent approaches.
Gun abolitionists envision a violence-free regime where only the government can exercise violence. It’s Thomas Sowell’s unconstrained vision, and a steroidal one at that, in a gun culture like America. Trade-offs, like swapping ten dead shitty drivers in road rage incidents for ten fewer kids killed in the next school shooting? Unconscionable. “We can do better,” chirps the self-satisfied left-hemispheric captive between sips of his latte.
But don’t discount the left-hemispherism of a hardcore gun advocate. You know the guy: he can scarcely feel the difference between the gun he’s packing and his erection, and he’s aching to unsheath both. His perfect resolution is to arm every adult, with exemptions given to the retarded, the peaceniks, pacifist clergy, and homosexuals. The moment someone is about to get dangerous--and what black man in a white neighborhood isn’t?– everyone in the immediate vicinity would Charles Bronson the shit out of him.
Left-hemispherics warring against one another.
It’s fun to watch, until it’s not.
And it stops being funny when one of them actually looks like he could win, and then we’re all stuck in another piece of shit jail constructed by the left hemisphere, kinda like we’re all stuck with Social Security and Obamacare. Great ideas, if only they weren’t hatched, incubated, erected, and sustained for way more than four hours by a swollen left hemisphere throbbing harder than a poor Viagra-overdosedsailor on Singaporean leave without five dolla for a holla.
The gun debate is nothing compared to the AI one. AI is the ultimate left-hemispheric machine: It has nothing but a left hemisphere, but a powerful one, and its owners are unleashing it on the world like a piece of white trash unleashing his pitbull on a kindergarten class.
It’s awful. I mean, if Co-Pilot pops up on my screen just one more time, offering to write my email or summarize a document or wipe me after I defecate, I’m gonna ball-peen my monitor. The AI jack-offs can’t fathom--or don’t care--that people need to do such things for themselves or they’ll turn into serfs of a technocratic and entirely left-hemispheric elite. (Actually, I suppose that’s the real goal here, but that’s a different essay.)
And if Co-Pilot isn’t molesting me, Gemini is poking me, Meta AI is groping me, Grok wants a piece of me, and Amazon’s Rufus is grooming me for its millions of retail rapists.
It’s awful.
But it’d be 1,000 times worse if only one AI ruled them all.
One giant AI machine controlling all other AI . . . and you, me, and everything else, reinforced by all three branches of government and the military.
One gunman and only one big-ass gun.
No other gunmen to bring him down, no other AI competitors to whack at his knees.
That’s when the AI Apocalypse is most likely to appear.
“If it’s hard for human beings to align AI, it would seem unlikely that a bevy of competing artificial intelligences would neatly converge on a shared anti-human goal.” Ross Douthat, “How to Survive the Robot Apocalypse”