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

In the UK there's 5 major Internet service providers like bt, sky etc. But there's another 80-100 smaller companies. Some are virtual, piggybacking on the bigger ones, but a lot have their own physical infrastructure. Plus all the mobile networks. Then all the big multinational companies that maintain their own hardware and connections. Then you've got all the satellite providers. They are mostly outside if UK control. You have to get every one of those to agree to pull the plug at the same time. It's not as simple as "just get the providers to turn it off".

Hey id be all for it if it was a viable plan.
I detest on line everything.
Someone very close to me is literally locked out of the modern world due to lifetime literacy issues(cognitive)
Coupled with no digital skills.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

But perhaps that is the answer? Start going back to analogue and the Royal Mail.

In short, start reinventing the wheel. Probably horse drawn carts, too. With the knowledge we have now, we could constructively extract the more straightforward ways of living in earlier generations.

Makes me think of the IT Crowd episode where Roy and Moss told Jen that the internet was in a small black box they gave her and that there would be total chaos if she lost it.

someones been watching Terminator

I really wish all these Russian bots would get to fuck.

We don’t get our intelligence just from the internet though. We’d still have spies is those countries. Turning our internet off would protect our assets whilst we regathered.

But you’re also assuming China or Russia will be the leading AI sources of danger, when the West is developing advanced AI too and look at the loon bin Trump and soon to be Farage, not sure I’d trust any of them.

Just look at the chaos that ensues when for example a banking app etc goes down.
One bank had to resort to pen and paper in branch and get customers to sign chits of paper for taking money out this wasn't a planned procedure but made up on the hoof.

Given we are a near cashless society it would cause total chaos to ‘switch it off’.
are we too reliant on it? Absolutely, does that put the Western world at risk? Absolutely. Does the western world need to invest heavily in infrastructure to keep us online/ protect our cyber space? Yes without a doubt.
but societies only ever move forward so the internet isn’t going anywhere.
the only thing which would potentially ‘reset’ global infrastructures would be either a huge global event like Krakatoa, combined with a global plague or a devastating global war. Otherwise it’s just not going to happen.

Are not IT workers supposed to know how it works then? People are allowed to be ignorance about topics they have no reason to know about. The AI concerns are all over the front page news, of course people will speculate.

I also think there’d be a lot of merit in rewinding the technological clock. Technology has come with pros and cons. And if mass safety were on the line, then I’d choose rewinding over mass casualties. Let’s hope AI doesn’t find its way to nuclear controls.

Well l suppose in theroy uk could disconnect all Internet, but what about russia and china? What will they be doing while we have no idea what's going on in the world?..

You do know we made AI don't you? It's not an alien thing that landed on Earth and we started using it without reading the label. Humans made it and programmed it, it's not independently sentient besides what it's been given the tools to develop from. You're talking as if it wandered in uninvited. And even just thinking about the UK, never mind the rest of the world, how would we manage even a week of our current food distribution, travel or banking without the internet? How would we go without them and many other services for the length of the reset?

Oh very naive!

This is an insane idea OP. Supermarkets, food supply chain, department stores, NHS, GPs, petrol transportation…. I could go on. All depends on internet. We would grind to a halt very quickly. Within hours

What happens to the millions who are reliant on it for work? My job for example is "on the internet"

It's a refreshing change over Covid paranoia, then Putin paranoia, then the unaccounted for nuclear weapons.
Tomorrow it will be something else.

Not "fake" as such, but just the fashionable subject of the day, people like to be anxious.

Isn’t it though? I’m probably naive but I thought the internet providers could just turn it off?

Can you explain why you think it wouldn’t be possible?

Most businesses will have business continuity plans.

Having said that, it would depend how long it would need to be down for. Small temporary blackout, fine. Longer term would pose lots of issues I’d imagine.

Can AI programmes be turned off, like other systems can? Pull the plug? Or is the risk that they find a way to function even if the company that owned it turned it off?

I’m so sick of the modern world sleepwalking into disasters. Climate change, health crisis and now AI. It’s so obvious that certain things are bad for us and our children, yet we do it anyway.

If the AI is that powerful it will probably already have made a copy.

Isn't the fear with AI that the problem is by the time we realise there is an issue it will be too late, because it will already be smarter than the smartest human. And the smartest human is still human.

Honestly its just not possible to turn the Internet off, what is it with this AI madness, if AI was that powerful it wouldn't let you turn Internet off, its not one plug😂

I don’t think you understand how the internet works.

Maybe that will be the goal of AI if they want to destroy our way of life. To make us think we have to do a big switch off to be safe when really it’s the reset we need.

People are bonkers 😆

We just ask AI how to do that 😄