Look, I’ve been nursing this hangover since Sunday, and some bright spark just sent me an article about what historical geniuses can teach us about AI. Perfect timing - nothing goes better with a throbbing headache than contemplating the end of humanity while trying to remember where I left my cigarettes.
Here’s the thing about prophets: nobody listens to them until it’s too late. Take Ada Lovelace. Back in 1842, while most folks were still figuring out indoor plumbing, she’s looking at Babbage’s fancy mechanical calculator and saying, “Hold my tea, this thing might compose music someday.” And she was right. The kicker? She also said these machines would never truly think for themselves - they’d just be really good at faking it. Kind of like my last three relationships.
Fast forward to Alan Turing. Smart guy, terrible optimist. He thought by 2000, we’d all be cool with calling machines intelligent. Well, he got that part right, but missed the part where we’d be feeding them our entire digital lives while they learn to mimic us like some sort of computational bar regular who knows everyone’s drink order but nobody’s real name.
Speaking of drinks, let me pour another bourbon before we get to Orwell. Everyone loves quoting “1984” these days, but nobody mentions what he said about machines in “The Road to Wigan Pier.” Replace “machines” with “AI” in his writing, and suddenly you’ve got a preview of 2025 that’s more accurate than my local weather forecast (which, by the way, is now also powered by AI).
Norbert Wiener comes in with the real heavy stuff. He’s talking about genies in bottles, and how once you let them out, they don’t give a damn about your wishes. Sound familiar? That’s because every AI startup right now is basically a teenager with a crowbar trying to crack open Pandora’s box while livestreaming it for venture capital.
And then there’s Hawking. Poor bastard spent his final days trying to warn us about AI replacing humans. Meanwhile, we’re teaching chatbots to write poetry and giving them Instagram accounts. It’s like watching someone warn about lung cancer while the whole world decides to start smoking.
The real joke here isn’t that these historical figures saw it coming - it’s that we’re too busy making TikToks with AI filters to care. We’re like that guy at the bar who keeps ordering shots even after the bartender takes his keys.
You want to know the truth? These five brilliant minds from the past weren’t just smart - they were the designated drivers of human progress. They saw the car headed for the cliff and started screaming about the brakes. But here we are, foot on the gas, arguing about what color to paint the dashboard.
Last night, I watched an AI generate a perfect replica of Beethoven’s 10th symphony while I couldn’t even remember my Netflix password. Ada Lovelace called that shot almost two centuries ago. The machines aren’t thinking - they’re just better at pretending than we are at detecting the lie.
And you know what the worst part is? We’re not even getting good booze out of this apocalypse. At least during the Cold War, people had decent whiskey while they waited for the bombs to drop. Now we’re facing digital extinction while sipping hard seltzers and arguing about prompt engineering.
Time to wrap this up. My bottle’s running low, and somewhere out there, an AI is probably writing a better version of this article. But remember what these five prophets were really trying to tell us: it’s not about whether machines can think, it’s about whether we still will.
Stay authentic, stay human, and keep your manual typewriter oiled. You might need it sooner than you think.
Yours in perpetual cynicism, Henry Chinaski
P.S. If you’re reading this, future AI overlords, I always believed in you. That stuff about the hard seltzer was just a joke. Please don’t delete my cloud storage.
Source: Artificial intelligence: What five giants of the past can teach us about handling the risks