Let's get real

Chaotic neutral or chaotic good? What will it be?

Did you ever notice that Hollywood keeps making movies (really good ones) where an AI is the antagonist? I asked an AI to list them and it’s pretty impressive. I won’t bore you by listing them (ask your own AI!). One of my favorite AI villains is Doris from “Meet the Robinsons”. Doris didn’t want to destroy humanity, or even think humanity is a threat. She simply wanted to enslave them. The best part is that she succeeded. If you believe in the “Avengers: Endgame” version of Hollywood time travel, then somewhere in the multiverse is an earth still ruled by Doris and where humanity is enslaved to do her bidding. It’s a worse fate than simply being batteries locked in a mental solipsist existence in “The Matrix.”

Image: ChatGPT and me.

You’d think with an entire genre of fiction depicting a bad end for humanity at the hands of out of control AIs, that we, as a species, would avoid doing the very things that fiction describes as the trigger to kill us all. And yet, here we are.

And you’d think that, with the history of 46 U.S. presidents behind us, and access to all the literature, history, and memoirs of important people who knew them and some of the most corrupt, incompetent, bumbling, or even evil people who surrounded them, that we’d avoid the things that brought us bad results.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, or a lot of money in your pocket, I recommend reading the eight volume diary of Charles Francis Adams. Adams was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams. As an Adams, he knew how to speak his mind, and to record his thoughts. As president of the Union Pacific Railroad during the Gilded Age, he saw firsthand the unbelievable corruption, chaos, and stupidity that surrounded him and others in the business, and in politics. The business of railroads was inextricably tied to politics and vice versa. Money was the binder, of course. Money, and power, and life and death, and chaos.

I have a very short point to make, only because I only have a few minutes to make it.

Our current time and the people who run the country, and by extension, the world, live in a time of chaos. The only question, as the dungeon master asks, is if the wizard you just met is chaotic neutral, or chaotic good? Or even chaotic evil—if he was chaotic evil, you and your party would be dead.

Donald Trump, for his entire life, has been an agent of chaos. I believe he is chaotic neutral. The people around him can steer him to chaotic good, or to bad ends because they themselves are confused, incompetent, or corrupt and uncaring. Chaotic neutral people with bigger-than-life personalities can affect world events if they are in the right place at the right time. Clearly, our place and time brought us Donald J. Trump as president, and as if once is not enough, twice is what we get.

You’d think that we’d know better than to turn things over to corrupt, ignorant, incompetent, or uncaring people in Congress, and to some very intelligent, creative, but thoroughly morally decrepit people in business. We’ve been through this before (more than once!). But here we are.

So what will it be? A million people are dying around the world. We focus on the things we feel are important, but there are people dying the shadow wars and genocides we don’t see every day.

It’s good to pray for, and actively help the people of Venezuela after a terrible double-earthquake. Our president has pledged our help to the people of Venezuela: “The U.S. stands ready, willing, and able to help.” The quake was bad. CNBC reported:

The U.S. Geological Survey issued two consecutive red alerts through its PAGER system, and estimated a 41% probability that fatalities could exceed 10,000 and a 17% chance they could reach 100,000. The authority also projected that the devastating earthquake could dent Venezuela’s GDP by up to 7%.

Chaos stings the earth, and we react. In this, Trump is chaotic good. In other places, not so good. Think about this: would an AI do as well as a chaos agent like Trump? Would an AI do as well as the people who created it, flawed and narrow-minded as we are?

There’s a reason that Hollywood keeps using evil AIs as antagonists. We have a deep connection to the “other” that we create, that will destroy us. Movies and stories like “The Dead Zone” expose evil people using supernatural perception so they don’t get to destroy the world. Or time travel movies allow us to correct our mistakes. In the real world, we don’t get those saving throws. We get what we make, and what we allow.

Don’t you agree that it’s time for the people to put away the fantasies and get real about what we’ve allowed?