Sorry for the delay in blogging and responding. We got caught up in the big snowstorm yesterday. Twelve inches of snow and no power for sixteen hours. Major pain in the tail!
Transformation originally dates to 2003. I hope you like the illustrations.
It has been very interesting doing illustrations for my stories. We hear a lot about artificial intelligence these days. AI is the engine behind all the drawing programs. It also powers the search engines we love, the phone answering systems we hate, and the grammar/spell checkers we need. AI is either the greatest thing since sliced bread and will transform the economy in miraculous ways or is the most dangerous thing we have ever invented. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but the one thing we can guarantee is that AI is here to stay.
Will it end civilization? Probably not. No matter what people are saying Skynet is not about to rain nuclear hell on us all. No matter what the news reports say, AI is not something that actually thinks. AI consists of extremely sophisticated computer code. Computers are not sentient. They do what we tell them to. Much more likely is that somebody asks an AI system, “Is it possible to shut down infrastructure in New York City?” The AI system then goes out and tries to answer the question posed to it – and shuts down NYC’s infrastructure as an experiment! Some of New York’s infrastructure is two hundred years old and very delicate. Most of the water supply for New York comes from the Catskills and runs through underground water pipes over a hundred years old; if the pressure were to drop, the pipes could collapse and New York loses water. Millions of people will be very thirsty.
Similar things could happen if somebody asks if the electric grid could be shut down, and AI tests that in January in Wisconsin. Maybe an AI system is asked how natural gas pipelines could be damaged, and it experiments by blowing up the pipelines by varying pipeline pressures. Or an AI system is tasked with testing fire protection in California during Santa Ana wind season and it starts multiple fires.
AI is with us, for good and for bad; we can’t turn it off. Will it kill all eight billion of us? That seems like a real stretch. Will it kill millions of us? Yes, but not if we are careful.