We will probably have to switch the internet off at some point in the next decade

I take it you’ve done your research into how close AI is bringing us to curing diseases and cancers? The biological advances are light years ahead of what you assume to be true, this isn’t about inflating stock prices on unfathomable claims, the markets know exactly how transformative this technology is.

We used analogue systems which we've got rid of.

I’m laughing at all these AI guys trying to boost their stock price with outrageous claims of curing cancer and taking over humans.

It is a huge bubble based on recycling the same invested cash. Sadly a recession will likely follow.

Billionaire Tech bro takeover…

The catalogue of disasters you spout @Cherrypi makes me more and more convinced that everything has gone too far and we need it turned off now.

If we were a more capable civilisation before the internet, with much more robust processes and systems that did not collapse so easily, what have we gained??

Being barred from the internet by your government is not the equivalent of turning the internet off- it just goes on without you.

Being barred from the internet by your government is not the equivalent of turning the internet off- it just goes on without you.

But even turning off social media would have disastrous consequences for huge numbers of self employed/businesses who rely on SM selling channels, which in turns has knock on effects for business support services, wholesalers, manufacturers, distribution networks, etc. Social media isn't just for people posting nonsense comments/pictures, it's a prime business channel for lots of people.

Blocking aspects needs an insane stretch to 'disable the whole thing'. If you said 'turn off' social media or something I'd agree it's perfectly possible (but still you'd never get it agreed by anywhere near enough people to do it!) but 'turning off' the internet is not just a stretch, it would be like proposing to 'disable' all roads completely for a while, it's that unfathomable to our current way of life. Just to pick one thing, we'd never get food distribution sorted for our current population without it, it would be a monumental task, and that's just one thing out of hundreds that would need to work without internet.

My service provider has, in the past suffered a denial of service attack, my bank, supermarket, doctors' surgery and hospital - the same. I'm sure most of them paid to get service back.
Bad actors in whatever country will deny us access soon enough, often enough, and for long enough.

@Badbadbunny Indeed, I said that work was done to avert the chaos that might have been. But I think there are a lot of similarities between the publicity there was for Y2K, and the "AI is evil" rhetoric that we are seeing now. One difference is that now, we are more connected, and can speculate about them, which was not so easy back then.

I think there are many other technological woes which are just as bad as AI, which are not talked about so much. One of them is this move away from owning the physical media: we are discouraged from owning DVDs, CDs, videotapes; and Fahrenheit 451 showed us how this could happen with books. Instead, we are nudged to store and stream them remotely, meaning that we can be charged subscription fees for them (again and again, year in year out), and they can be snatched away by the powers that be, when they don't fit the agenda. I think this is similarly dangerous, and we are not noticing it happening.

@scalt

Think of the Millennium Bug: there was massive scaremongering about it, and it turned out to be a non-event;

It was only a "non event" because there were huge numbers of people working their arses off for the years leading up to it, businesses and organisations spending huge sums of money replacing ageing computers and software, etc.

In the two firms I worked at in the 90s, first being 93-96 and the second being 96 onwards, it was the most important thing we discussed at Board and management meetings, and even though both firms were pretty small (dozens rather than hundreds of staff), both spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on new computers/software and engaged extra staff/IT consultants to oversee the transition, and ensure all old/legacy data was converted into a usable form in newly created archives in new computers/software.

We were under no illusion that our entire IT infrastructures would have collapsed had we not done it causing business failure. It wasn't scaremongering, it was real. We did "simulations" using isolated computers (removed from the main network and created a new secondary "dummy" network) and resetting the inbuilt computer date (BIOS) past 1/1/2000, entering forward dated transactions etc with a date post 1/1/2000, and our systems did indeed crash spectacularly rendering them unusable.

As a result of the sheer amount of money and hard work to virtually replace our entire computer network (plus printers, scanners, modems, software, operating systems, etc)., 1/1/2000 came and passed with a whimper, as had been planned for, with no problem at all.

Also, believe it or not, the "internet" has existed in one form or another since the 1970s. "Internet" collectively refers to lots of networks joined together. It was only in about 1997 that many people started to have it at home.

People probably thought that other forms of mass communication were similarly evil, when they were new: television, telephone, radio, and even printing. Television was relatively new when Hitler made his broadcasts; I find the idea that he could speak to the public in their homes a bit chilling, like Boris Johnson's briefings. It's also noted that Hitler demanded to be filmed from a lower angle than usual, so that people would see him "looking down" on them

Someone said "get the fax machines out, use ATMs". Even back in the day, they were all interlinked by a network; it just wasn't called "the internet". A fax was probably hailed as a technological revolution at the time: you could send a document to the other side of the world in seconds. I remember hearing that when the National Lottery was introduced in about 1994, the network which linked all the retailers' machines together was one of the fastest in the world, so that a lottery ticket could be "instantly" produced. (The drawing of the numbers certainly wasn't the fastest process in the world, though; does anyone remember how protracted that process was, on TV? A celebrity making the draw, and the numbers being drawn one by one, while the cheers got louder. I never understood why the groans didn't get louder, as more and more people discovered they hadn't won.)

People are saying "AI is a conspiracy out to get us", and this debate seems to be welcomed on Mumsnet. But when people tried to point out that a possible cashless society could be a government conspiracy to monitor and control public spending, they were accused of being tinfoil hatters, granny killers, conspiracy theorists, etc.

While I don't advocate switching off the internet, it might be a good thing if the public starts to notice the "evils" of the internet. Will the screen-addicted teenagers suddenly and ironically become vocal about the evils of AI? Think of the Millennium Bug: there was massive scaremongering about it, and it turned out to be a non-event; yes, we were told that people did work hard behind the scenes to put it right, but I think it did make people realise how dependent we are on technology, even then, when the internet was still not as widespread. And not so well-known is the "year 2038 problem" (look it up): because of the way computers store dates with traditional programming, they cannot store them beyond 2038. I expect there will be another "millennium bug" fear campaign then.

It would be very ironic if the government suddenly stopped the internet. I distinctly remember Tony Blair saying early in his tenure "I want every household to have the internet". (Perhaps he foresaw how useful it would be for shackling the public in various ways, such as in 2020, or with a cashless society, but that's another debate.) In fact, I'd be almost relieved by a temporary internet outage: the cashless society would be delayed by a decade or two, and lots of things would have a backup which wasn't online. Lockdowns lasting months on end would not be possible without the internet. We'd go back to storing our data on our hard discs, instead of in "the cloud", where the government could raid them at any moment.

Does anyone else remember this series? I remember being absolutely terrified by the first episode, can't remember if I saw any more. They are not online anywhere that I could find.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If..._(TV_series)

They couldn't get everyone to wear masks or be vaccinated or even social distance when we had a global pandemic. I don't think every citizen would just accept being cut off from the internet. There would be bootleg connections all over the place. You do know it's possible to connect via satellite?

Not to mention all governments coordinating etc - so unless all countries coordinated then you'd get people near the borders connecting to foreign 5G towers and linking that connection back into the country, and if the aim is to cut off the AI from the internet then cutting some of the people off but not all probably doesn't help.

It's sort of like saying can't we just switch all the power off? Well you can switch off the power network, but that won't stop people from having generators, batteries, solar panels etc.

And also I think governments would be very averse to just cutting off power/internet because there will be infrastructure-critical things which run on those systems which could cause incredible harm if you just stopped them with no ramp-down plan in place. Many of our medicine and food supplies rely on refrigeration, and wouldn't last long without power, for example.

For internet - smart motorways suddenly no longer monitored - they are already dangerous enough, now they are death traps. I'd guess a lot of air and rail traffic control is also managed through online communications as well so that could also be very dangerous. I think these probably have fallbacks, but I remember previously when large rail networks or ATC have had communications issues, it's caused mass delays and difficulties. That multiplied by every single system could be catastrophic.

Card payments tend to run through phone lines or probably internet today. That always causes chaos when it goes down even for 1-2 bank networks and it is usually fixed within 24h because of the massive amount of lost profits. But now imagine that all card payments, all cash machines are inaccessible for days at a time - people could run out of food and start rioting.

You might as well advocate for going back to pre industrial revolution and say 'how did we manage without large scale machinery' because you're talking about a completely different period in history and we cannot go backwards! That's not how time, evolution and progress work

Absolute pie in the sky.

What’s a ’proper’ job?

Yes, but the new technologies including machine learning methods are accelerating progress rapidly.

I think many people are worried that AI means they will have to get a "proper" job

Perhaps everyone should go over to 02 then they’ll never have any internet anyway.

This. It isn't possible just to 'disconnect' the internet. Our society can't function without it now, but AI is a global threat.

You do know that AI isn't just an internet thing and the internet is not just about AI?

You can also run some AI offline just on a regular desktop, a fair bit if you have a good set up, although nothing compared to the big tech versions.

It can be built into things that are not connected to the internet and that is only going to increase over time.

AI also is a very vague term, so which type of AI are you talking about?

The basic AI in many modern washing machines and robot hoovers?
The spell checkers and text suggestion AI built into some software?
The AI in many modern cars, tvs, ovens, fridges or toothbrushes?

I'm not sure you could remove AI from the world easily even if the internet somehow went down forever as it's basically becoming woven into ever increasing aspects of everyday life.

The only bit on the internet is cloud hosted models like Chat GPT.
They aren't all sitting in some big box you could point at and say 'there is the AI bit.'
It is human error in coding and data poisoning by humans you need to be worrying about.
For AI to believe it is an evil thing who wants to take over the world, a human would have to add it to it's hard coded logic, or poison it's data to mess with it's foundational weights.