The Deeper Dive: Dystopia Unbound
David Haggith

Applying the words of Tom Wolfe, today’s Deeper Dive is a look at this week’s very strange, electric-Kool-Aid, acid-test news assortment.

In other words, it’s a whole bunch of far-out stuff. It’s written a little more on the lighter side, or snider side, but there was just such a bunch of peculiar news that is now normal that I couldn’t let it all go by without comment. (Keep your sarcasm detector turned on.)

It’s a Chipper world

First off, we had mad scientist Elon Musk announcing he plans to have a full human-born population roaming the earth within ten years. His astronomical plans are to get Neuralinkbrain implants into millionS of people within a decade. No sense doing longterm testing like we do with drugs for a decade before we even start using them in a widespread manner. Just start chipping up the general population. Its chips ahoy from here to the horizon of humanity.

I’m sure he’ll run into road blocks from the FDA that slow his enormous aspirations and maybe some law suits, like he has self-driving Teslas, but I can hardly even see myself wanting to live in a world increasingly full of and run by the prototypes for Star Trek’s Borg. What a hostile society that will become between the Chips and the Old-Bloods like me who refuse to get superpowers, so we become almost unemployable, maybe even unable to operate the new central-bank digital currencies.

Elon Musk wants to implant millions of people with Neuralink brain chips…

According to the firm, the second patient to be fitted with the device was able to use it to play first-person shooter games and design three-dimensional objects.

“If all goes well, there will be hundreds of people with Neuralinks within a few years, maybe tens of thousands within five years, millions within 10 years,” Mr Musk wrote on X in response to Neuralink’s blog post.

One day, when millions of Chippers are running around, there will be a large solar storm that will fry the chips inside of their heads creating a nice little molten smoke patch inside of all their brains simultaneously, taking down airplanes midair, running trains too fast around curves and derailing, crashing semis hurtling down the highway. It won’t just because the machines chips got fried. It will be because their human operators, if they even have human operators were using their Neuralink chip to operate the vehicles’ digital controls, and they went up in smoke.

In a not-so-alternative world, some rogue nation will fire an EMP nuclear bomb over the US and disable all of the enemies’ brains at once. Of course, the assumption that we have brains, given the things like this we are now doing, runs a little long in itself. The zombie apocalypse will have begun, except that won’t be almost immortal. We’ll just all have fried frontal cortexes where the chips were implanted but our alligator brains will still be keeping us alive and our motor cortexes will still be moving us along. We’ll be able to eat because the desire for food is hardwired into the deeply buried alligator brain. We just won’t be able to think or feel emotions.

But here’s the good news:

Mr Musk claims the technology will one day allow humans to merge with artificial intelligence in order to augment brain and body performance.

That’s a wedding I sure want to see. The marriage between man and machine. Man creates the machine; the machine recreates what it means to be man as it enters the circuits of our mind and speeds up their development with new creative AI ideas for how our heads should be wired. 

Potential applications include streaming music directly to the brain and improving eyesight to view new parts of the light spectrum, according to Mr Musk, however some neuroscientists claim such capabilities are decades away and come with risks of hacking and cyber attacks.

Yes, human will be hackable. Someone will find a way to hold your brain hostage with ransomware. Mad scientists don’t worry about these things. Let’s hope Gen-X Musk doesn't partner up with Boomer Bill of Microsoft fame, or everyone’s bionic eyes will wake up one morning seeing nothing but blue screens of death. I cannot even imagine the novel psychological troubles and hallucinations and horrors the next generation, Gen-AI, will face.

Here is the enticement into this Neuralinked world: think of how smart you can be when you can link your thoughts directly to some AI mainframe to Google anything you need to now and have it flash up on your bionic retinas. OK, it’s not all going to happen right away, but Musk is taking big steps to get to that cyborg hybrid existence for human beings as quickly as he can.

By the time he gets us where he wants us, Musk will also have completely cluttered the skies of earth forever with rings of his space junk because, apparently, if you’re a skyward-thinking multi-billionaire, you have the right to cover everyone else’s skies with your clutter and garbage, and you don’t even have to get permission. Just treat them as your own. No human child will ever see normal skies again because of all the debris up there. It’s not like you can ever go up with a street sweeper and clean it all up. 

Mayor madness

Taking the whole AI nightmare a little closer to home and much closer in time and taming it down just a touch, we also had news this week of a man running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, who is really a stand-in for a AI bot that will run the city if he gets elected (because you still have to be a human to run, I guess). Question is will he be using AI to run the city more smartly, or is the AI running him as the essential front for its plans by manipulating and cheering on his fantasies?

Plans for AI to ‘run city’ as mayoral candidate insists ‘Vic’ bot would be good for democracy

Victor Miller has always been a big fan of sci-fi books, so it's no surprise that he was also an early advocate for AI bots.

Vic has built his own running mate, using ChatGPT, also named “VIC.” (I didn’t even know mayors could have running mates. Vice mayor?)

“I started wondering if AI would make a better mayor than any human,” he said.

Yes, why not just replace yourself.

“Making decisions that affect many people requires a careful balance of data-driven insights and human empathy,” VIC said.

“Here’s how I would approach it,” it added [apparently VIC prefers the “it” pronoun], before listing and explaining six different aspects of a plan he would use to govern fairly….

The librarian said his plan is to take care of everything that the robot cannot — such as ribbon-cutting ceremonies and in-person events — while leaving the executive functioning up to VIC.

OK. So, the human will do all the frothy stuff and leave the big decision to the bot.

I hope they hurry up and get the town council loaded with bots, too, because city council meetings will run so much faster when all the council member can just tag up with the electro-mayor on wifi and discuss things at light speed without humans even having to hear their planning.

And people are accepting it. Said one septuagenarian citizen who didn’t want to be left behind the times as the Chippers move in,

“I’ve got an open mind…. It’s a brave new world," he added, referencing the popular 1932 dystopic novel by Aldous Huxley….

Experts agreed that VIC's candidacy was unprecedented — but said it was also dangerous.

“This incident in Wyoming seems to be testing the frontiers of local regulation,” Valerie Wirtschafter, who researches AI and democracy at the Brookings Institution, told WAPO.

“While OpenAI may have certain policies against using its model for campaigning, other companies do not, so it makes shutting down the campaign nearly impossible.”

OK, you can breathe a sigh of relief: Vic and VIC already lost their race. 

Cheyanne residents went to the polls on Tuesday and decisively chose not to step into the future quite yet.

Out of 65,000 residents and 11,000 votes cast, VIC got only 327. Apparently, there are still a lot of people in Cheyenne who are not willing to let bots run their lives by executive decision.

All hail the bot cars

Next up, we have something a lot less surprising, but, in my opinion, something I’d still rather live without. Uber will begin offering its self-driving taxis this fall.

Uber Technologies Inc. plans to start offering self-driving Cruise LLC cars to customers on its ride-hailing platform next year.

All hail the Borg! If you’re a Chipper, you soon may not even have to use the word “hail.” Just think taxi! This will take a brave new world if we get those on the road at the same time they start loading up the highways with self-driving sixteen wheelers. That ought to be a fun little game of driverless dodgeball on the freeway. I know I always feel more comfortable knowing there is no one at the wheel, especially given how many times self-driving Teslas have run themselves off the roads and over pedestrians.

General Motors Co.’s Cruise has been trying to regain traction after grounding its fleet in October following the mishandling by prior management of a collision with a pedestrian. One of the San Francisco-based firm’s vehicles struck and dragged a pedestrian, who was hospitalized for months. California regulators pulled Cruise’s driverless license alleging that the company was not forthcoming with details about the incident.

I feel safer already.

Uber said the offering will begin early next year in a single market in the US to start, while declining to disclose the location.

Pick me! Pick me! Can’t wait to ride that headless carriage. 

Now let's segue over from the realm of cyborg control—even directly of our towns and cities if the Borg Party can just win an election—to iceberg control in the world of whacky weather. Only this weather is whacky because it’s not whacky in the way global warming scientists say it is supposed to be. We have three extreme weather stories below from this week, too.

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