Nah. It doesn’t take Skynet. That’s not the machine apocalypse I’m worried about.
Sure, you’ll get the occasional automated drone oopsie, but not a global or country-wide catastrophe. Like Marco Rubio, computers are no-where near true self-awareness or rational thought.
A big part of the accounting software I’ve written is just-in-time inventory control. Banks no longer like it when your company is well-stocked; now its considered dead stock. Even seasonal items aren’t supposed to be kept for the same season the following year. So we’ve been getting increasingly good at automatically adjusting ordering for seasonal and other trends, and getting stock on the shelves only at the very last minute before it’s needed.
This is done with food too. That’s important for meat and fruit of course, but it’s also done with much less perishable food. I’ve seen news stories claiming that we have only about four days of food in the pipeline at grocery stores.
Imagine a vindictive AI taking over not the current drone force, but the current software controlling food distribution. More realistically, imagine the occasional oopsie seen in automated stock trading - $Billions lost in minutes - applied to the food distribution system.
With so little extra food in the pipeline, imagine what happens the next time we have an event like the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, leading to another Year Without a Summer.
