AI Catastrophe! Ultimate Torment of the Species: Interrogation by Chatbot.

Once, many years ago, while studying a theatre programme, I read in a note on performers the observations of the polymathic opera director Jonathan Miller who confessed his worst fear was to be tortured for information he did not possess.

    My congenital morbidity tells me I can imagine a fate far worse.

.

Scene from Metropolis the 1927 expressionist silent film 

directed by Fritz Lang, whose Maschinenmensch is the

prototypal humanoid robot for dystopian visionaries.

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Chatbot Torquemada.

Far worse, surely, would be if one survived the torture of a robotic intérrogatoire énergique to be condemned to the torture of the intérrogatoire prolongée by a fiendish inquisitor – a Chatbot Torquemada – to extract information one did not possess.

 

I have no doubt that such an instrument of torment for the ultimate surrender of humanity is at this moment in development at Artificial Intelligence HQ, a secret black site whose location is unknown to me . . . an example of specific information that, regardless of the consequences, I do not possess.
 

 

Variation on a Theme by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

‘Man is a fish that swims in its own sperm.’
             Imagine then a clean white linen napkin
wound firmly round an eel so muscular
             and strong, plunging and twisting in the palm,
that it’s difficult to hold; whereupon
             the knife you take, with which you tried to kill the
bread, neither this sombre iridescence slays:
             The eel rears from your grasp and smites your face. 

                  Catherine Eisner
                  with respectful acknowledgements 
                  to the Restaurant du Chat qui Pêche
                  by Edna St. Vincent Millay
                  (Century Magazine 1923)

Edna St. Vincent Millay bathing
(circa 1927).