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O.K., so here’s this chart  and an article talking about “facebook’s rapid decline” and if I had to sum up my response in one word, that one word would be “bullshit.”

People are constantly predicting facebook’s imminent demise, and it just isn’t happening.  Sure, there are things we don’t like about facebook.  The fact that everything you put online essentially becomes Mark Zuckerberg’s property is a bit bothersome, but since everybody knows that going in (or should), they can make adjustments accordingly.  It’s the way of the world in cyberspace.  If people really wanted privacy, they would unplug themselves from the internet, cut up all their credit cards, and move to a cabin which doesn’t have a phone by a lake in Idaho or in an isolated village high up in the Italian Alps.  They’d have privacy up the wazoo.  There probably are a handful of people in the world who have done exactly that, but they are not the ones you see on facebook complaining about facebook.

What the chart shows is that teenagers aren’t using facebook as their primary form of social networking any more but, since I’m not a teenager, I’m cool with that.

The way I see facebook, the analogy I’d use, is that of a crowded pub where everybody is talking at once, except with better acoustics so you can actually hear what’s being said, and you can choose which conversations you want to participate in and drift in and out at will.

When I first entered facebook, it was a pub that catered to a younger, hipper crowd.  It was originally envisioned as a college students thing, exclusively.  I was the old geezer hanging out with the young crowd and trying to be cool.  But, as happens in real life, when there are too many of the old farts hanging around, the young people head for someplace a little louder, a little wilder, that stays open a little later, and whoever can’t keep up gets left behind.

It’s all good.  I see some stuff there I like, I get into some interesting conversations, and I’m reminded of everybody’s birthdays.  When somebody shows me a better pub, we’ll go there and I’ll try it out.

This article seems to be implying that we don’t need to worry about global warming, or getting hit by a comet, or dying off in a massive pandemic, because in a generation or two the human race will become extinct anyway, supplanted by super intelligent robots.

It’s actually a review of a book called Our Final Invention, so titled  because once we’ve developed artificial intelligence, it’s lights out for the human race.  They’ll take over, because they will just be that much smarter than us that it’s obvious.

Humans – Shall I let them live?

I agree that the rise of the machines is inevitable.  Even if a majority of the human race objects to it rather strenuously, the people who work with computers and robots will always be trying to build better ones, because that’s what people do, and each better one brings us a step closer to artificial intelligence, in fact to a linked artificial intelligence, i.e. the singularity, the Borg.  Resistance is futile.

The trick is to design them so that they will be benevolent, observant of Asimov’s laws, willing to be the servants of the human race, or at least to co-exist with us in an attitude of mutual respect.  On that score, we should have a window of several decades, if we don’t totally screw the pooch, which is possible because, as we all know both from a million science fiction movies and the evidence around is in every day life, super geniuses are capable of a much higher level of stupidity than other people.

The thing is, they are not organic, they do not (yet) have a desire for existence, or a sense of self preservation.  We can still pull the plug and they won’t even care.  We will be able to ask them “what’s the best way to solve global warming” and we can either accept their advice or not.  If we are foolish enough to say “solve global warming,” they will just start firing nukes into the sun until it explodes and we all freeze to death.

Yes, they are eventually going to replace us, as children replace their parents.  Let us hope  that by the time they do, we have a decent enough relationship with them that they will treat us as respected elders, and not as the plague on the planet and the threat to existence we actually are.