I was on Facebook briefly but decided I just wasn’t very interested in my Facebook friends’ pets, diets, exercise routines, grandchildren, or frankly, their lives. The lack of a downvote function was also a disincentive. So I got off with no regrets. I’ve never been on any other social media, but it must have some sort of allure, judging from the millions who are on it. From Adrienne LaFrance at theatlantic.com:
The Doomsday Machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is buried deep underground, but connected to a computer, which is in turn hooked up to sensors in cities and towns across the United States.
Nobody is pining for megadeath. But megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.
