The technology now exists to computationally render video games in a way that makes them playable in real time – for the first time ever. Accomplished The classic pixelated first-person shooter game, Doom.
Don't yawn. This isn't just a footnote in geek history. Elon Musk was quick to respond to the news, promise“Tesla can do the same with real-world video.”
We are now ruled by people desperate to maintain power no matter the cost – people who want to be the first to get their hands on the most powerful AI being developed.
The military application of this latest breakthrough is obvious: the person at the terminal, or in the driver's seat, enters a seamless virtual environment that is as complex and challenging as a flesh-and-blood environment…at least when it comes to war. Yes, war has a strange way of simplifying or minimizing our lived experience of our environment: kill, survive, advance, repeat. It is no wonder that the technological goal of modeling or simulating a given world pairs so well with the art and science of destruction.
But another milestone in the advancement of computer technology raises deeper questions about the automation of doom itself. Announced The company said it had “witnessed the first AI-to-AI cryptocurrency transaction.”
“What did one AI buy from another AI? Tokens! Not crypto tokens, but AI tokens (basically the term used between LLMs). We bought tokens with tokens,” he tweeted, adding a 🤯 emoji. “AI agents can't get bank accounts, but they can get crypto wallets. They can now trade with humans, merchants, or other AIs using USDC on Base. These transactions are instant, global, and free. This,” he concluded enthusiastically. “is an important step towards AI getting useful work done.”
In a technologically advanced and fragmented world, “Doomerism” is linked to the fear that rapid advances in computers will lead to automated superintelligence and the extinction of humanity.
Oddly enough, a more mundane possibility has received little attention. Sustainable Wars will soon be waged in a “set it and forget it” fashion: we can instruct our smart assistants to organize and execute military operations, handle all the payments and logistics (human or machine), and then get back to fishing, hiking, or reviewing literature.
Of course, there is always a risk that retaliation could escalate into global catastrophe, but somehow we have avoided that terrible fate, despite countless deaths and the widespread use of nuclear weapons in wars.
Perhaps it would be better to focus on the obvious threat of conventional world war in the digital age.
But this would require a recognition that such a “conceivable” war is itself so bad that we must change our ways immediately, rather than sitting around scared to death with dark fantasies of the enslavement or extermination of humanity.
To achieve this, no matter how much technology advances, responsibility The consequences of technology will always be ours, so the ultimate concern in the digital age is to whom we are responsible and accountable.
As the origin of the word Person in Charge Clearly (it derives from an ancient term referring to the pouring out of libations in ritual sacrifice), this question of human responsibility is inescapably linked to religious concepts, experiences and traditions.
Avoiding the autocomplete of world wars means accepting that religion is the basis of a digital order for which we were not prepared in the electric age epitomized by John Lennon's “Imagine.” It means facing up to the fact that different civilizations with different religions are already well down the path to dealing with the advent of supercomputers in very different ways.
And that means making sure those differences don't lead to one or more civilizations panicking and setting off a chain reaction of automated violence that engulfs the world. Not the extinction of humanity, just the destruction of billions of lives. Wouldn't that be enough?
Unfortunately, at this time, the country most vulnerable to that civilizational anomaly is the United States. Not only has it been hit hardest by developments in digital technology, but it has also relatively moved the furthest from our status as a global superpower until very recently. We are now governed by people desperate to preserve power at all costs. They are also the ones seeking first access to the most powerful AI being developed.
Automated conflict is certainly frightening, but to the billions of humans who would suffer most in a world war, and to the millions of Americans who would suffer the most, the greatest threat is not the machines themselves, but the people who most want to control them.
