the AI takeover ?

[perfringo]

I have a dark opinion of the world. Overpopulation, mass shootings, nuclear war, asteroid collision, human extinction, etc. Robots taking some jobs seems to be able to adjust itself out compared to the others. And its something that you are I cannot change, so there is no sense in raising your blood pressure about it.

Be with force! Don't let dark side to take over.

Some unsolicited bits and bites:

overpopulation - Earth population will stabilise at 10 bln. It's not belief, it's called statistics. Hans Rosling TED presentation: Religion and babies. At 10:40 there is simple yet powerful explanation why population of earth is still growing although childbirth peaked some time ago.

mass shooting - loss of life is tragedy. According to statistics there are 323 of victims of mass shootings in US in 2018 (https://www.gunviolencearchive.org). On the other hand from wikipedia we can learn: "There were 19,392 firearm-related suicides in the U.S. in 2010.[10] The U.S. Department of Justice reports that approximately 60% of all adult firearm deaths are by suicide, 61% more than deaths by homicide." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violen...ted_States). There were 37,133 motor vehicle deaths in 2017 and about 2,000 children under 16 die every year in traffic collisions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehi...S._by_year). Mass shootings are terrible and challenge to our society. However, if our aim is to save as much lives as possible what must worry us the most?

nuclear war - there has been no nuclear war (only one nuclear strike). If we would ask AI about probability of nuclear war the answer would probably be along those lines: "probability is too low to calculate". Why? The artificial intelligence systems of today learn from data – they learn only from data. An object classification system cannot recognize an object it has not been told about during training. The machines trained with today’s technology will not figure out on their own that ice is frozen water. They cannot predict when nuclear arsenals will lead to nuclear war.

asteroid collision - there are simple yet effective ways to prevent fate of dinosaurs. Have a look to this TED talk: How to defend Earth from asteroids (if you don't have enough time to spare, just look at last 4 minutes or so)

I also struggle with dark side quite often. My medicine is to check data to find out whether my fears have solid foundation or not. This however more often than not leads to finding even bigger worries...