It's still just February, but that didn't stop me from getting sunburned today. I was burning some sticks in the yard, and I stood by the fire for about three hours. The right-facing sides of my face, neck, and right arm got sunburned.
I can't recall ever getting a sunburn this early in the year before. Normally, I never burn in winter. But today was unseasonably warm, so I guess that was the difference.
At least I got a chore done. Many more to go.
Venus looked enormous in the night sky on Monday night. Bigger than I can ever recall seeing it.
If you've got a clear night in your area this week, try to take a moment to look west after sunset. The planet is pretty magnificent.
It really does sort of feel like that, doesn't it? It feels like the AI sector has become an arms race. You've got all the Silicon Valley versions of AI, and now you've also got the Chinese DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen. Now that AI competition is international and multi-polar, it's only a matter of time before it's militarized.
I'm not even trying to keep up with all the latest news in this industry, by the way, because it's all just moving way too fast for me. Which supports my theory of it being a new arms race.
The good news is that competition drives down prices for consumers. Also, the open-source nature of DeepSeek allows enterprising folks to play around with it and see what they can invent, so the human spirit actually has a chance to flourish here in ways it couldn't before.
The bad news is that there's the possibility of some real nightmare scenarios resulting from AI. I don't mean movie-type stuff like Skynet or HAL-9000. I mean like some vengeful person using AI to invent a virus that specifically targets an ethnic group. I did something similar to this in Auxiliary's Revenge, and I'm frankly getting tired of seeing some of the things I write about come to fruition here in the real world. And when I say "tired," I actually mean horrified.
I don't think AI will destroy us all, but it will probably destroy a lot of us before it's all said and done.
