Jack of Harts

AI is going to kill us all.
But before that, Climate Change was going to kill us all.
And before that, Global Warming was going to kill us all.
Before that, The Coming Ice Age was going to kill us all.
And somewhere in there, Nuclear War was going to kill us all.
And of course I grew up in Bible-believing churches knowing that the Battle of Armageddon would be the end of us all.

I’ve lived long enough that the coming AI Apocalypse is the sixth End of the World scenario I’ve read about and studied and can put an easy name on for a daily post.

Look. Maybe it will be the one that gets us. But none of the others have, because so far we have either seen the signs and corrected our behavior so it didn’t happen, or we saw it for the utter intellectual hogwash that it was and moved on with our lives.

I don’t know which way AI will go in this case. In my own writing, I took a somewhat pessimistic POV with AIs waking up and wanting to kill us all. But other AIs woke up and liked us and chose to defend us. And in the end the friendly AIs won and we moved into a new golden age of humanity with our new friends helping us.

Do I think that is a likely outcome? Not really. I think it far more likely that an AI who wanted to kill us would be smart enough not to declare war on us, and instead encourage us to sit back and do nothing with our lives and wait for us to fade away. But that doesn’t make for an interesting story, so I didn’t do that in my writing.

In the end though, I think it far more likely that AI will be harnessed by the people who made it and weaponized (like all other weapons are) to harm their enemies. If the Communists and Socialists command the best AIs on the planet, they will use them to tear down the rest of the world. And THAT is the AI Apocalypse I actually believe to be the most likely. And it will make the death tolls both National and International Socialism built up in the 20th Century look like they were playing patty-cake with humanity. They killed millions of people. And depending on who you count as people, maybe as many as a billion. The people who proclaim their world view openly talk about killing multiple billions of people to get down to their preferred population level. They use terms like “reducing the population” but I consider the kind of starvation and mass death their policies promote to be straight up killing.

And that is why I truly believe we must continue to research and use AI. The Free World must have a toe in the AI fight or like any other weapon forged by man, we will have no defense against it when someone decides to use it against us. I don’t know whether or not AI will wake up to be evil, but I KNOW what evil lies in the hearts of my fellow man. So I would much rather us AI as a tool to make our lives better and to defend us in hopes that any AI that does wake up would like to continue doing that. I consider that to be a far better plan for the future than letting those who have killed hundreds of millions of people get the power to kill billions of it.

Those are my thoughts on the matter, and why I have no issues at all with harnessing AI to do things. Like any other tool that can be used as a weapon, we must learn how to use it and how to make it and how to wield it if necessary. It is the entire concept of the American Second Amendment. An armed populace, trained in the use of arms, and wielding those arms in every day life, is a populace that can defend itself from other people using those arms to hurt them.

I enjoy good clothing. And I enjoy coming up with the clothing my characters wear in each story.

That usually starts with researching what is period appropriate, and then factoring in what they like based on previous stories.

Captain William Carter usually wears some form of a great coat. Duster. Trenchcoat. Whatever is period accurate. Some form of a wide-brimmed hat, and most of the time he has tinted spectacles or sunglasses to protect his eyes and mind from the veil between the worlds that mortals are not supposed to look into. Also, they look cool.

For Cuba in 1956, dancing in a party at El Tropicana, I decided to go with just a classic look for William. A white shirt and trousers, nice black cowboy boots, and a white Florida hat. And sunglasses. Flashy for the time without being overly flashy. Every part of it is common wear at the time, and won’t catch the eye as odd. Just flashy enough to show people he’s trying, without being memorable for the time. And the brim of the Florida hat is useful for the times you want to hide your face. Which someone who doesn’t want to be identified may be real concerned about.

The clothing is part of the character. That’s the thing to always remember.

The name Skin Deep Havana is what you might consider a play on words with double meaning. Or more than that.

Many consider the beauty of Havana in the 1950s to have been skin deep. Fragile. Never meant to last.

But to the Selkies, their skin is what makes them strong. Their pelt. If they lose it, they are forever trapped. But with it, they can go wherever they want.

This story in Havana was truly skin deep, in every way that mattered.