Culture
AI Cures Cancer in 2045 and Charges $47 for the McRib Today
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
Jon Stewart, a man who has spent three decades being paid to be alarmed on camera, turned his alarm this week toward artificial intelligence, asking the question that has apparently occurred to no one with actual authority: why can't we just slow this down?
The answer, sources close to the situation confirm, is money. The secondary answer is also money. There is no tertiary answer because the tertiary answer had its position eliminated by a machine that completed the same task in 0.3 seconds and didn't need dental.
Stewart laid out what he described as the central contradiction of the AI moment: in the future, the technology will cure diseases, end suffering, and presumably solve the protein-folding problem for conditions that have resisted medicine for a century. In the present, it is primarily occupied with drone targeting, municipal surveillance networks, and calculating the precise dollar amount a person stranded at an airport on a Tuesday in February will pay for a McRib before weeping openly.
That number, researchers now believe, is $47.
"We are at an extraordinary moment in human history," Stewart said, in the specific voice of a man who has been at an extraordinary moment in human history every single week since 1999. "The question is whether we use this for the betterment of humanity, or whether we just let it run."
Currently it is running.
The companies building the systems Stewart finds troubling responded to his segment with a joint statement describing their commitment to "responsible development, iterative safety frameworks, and stakeholder-aligned deployment timelines," which is the sentence a language model writes when you ask it to say nothing at length and sound like you mean it. Three of the four executives who signed the statement had, that same morning, announced layoffs attributed to automation efficiencies. The fourth was at Davos, which is where people go when they want to discuss the dangers of concentrated power in a room that costs $25,000 to enter.
Stewart's broader point, delivered with the cadence of a man explaining why the dishwasher was loaded incorrectly, is that the technology is advancing faster than any democratic institution has shown the slightest interest in governing it. Congress, he noted, is still working through the implications of email. The Senate Commerce Committee held three hearings on AI regulation last year, all of which were live-captioned by an AI that occasionally described the proceedings as "a nature documentary about elderly men encountering computers for the first time."
The caption was not wrong.
Sam Altman, who has been described as either the most important person in technology or a man playing a very long game of pretend depending on who you ask, did not respond directly to Stewart's segment. He did post on X that he was "excited about the future" and that the path to artificial general intelligence "requires us to move with urgency and care," which are two things that are opposites of each other, a fact no one in his mentions appeared to have noticed.
Stewart's episode was watched by an estimated 2.4 million people, all of whom were served, immediately afterward, a targeted advertisement for a product they had mentioned out loud earlier that day.
They did not slow down.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/jon-stewart-the-daily-show-ai-threat-1235637407/