Five-part mini series outro: where do we stand; where do we go now?

Update: "one more for the road", next comes a last AI experiment, a compact journalistic bookend to the mini-series intro on Cybernetics then & AI now.

Note: find at bottom an index to the five-part mini-series this post will wrap up & frame.

Let his be a hand-written close to this AI experiment: it helped in new ways in this mini-series; but in the end the posts were not mine, even if I seeded them. It reflects in a tiny way what Ezra Klein flags in this dire warning in New York Times, summary & in 3 sentences:

This New York Times opinion piece argues that the most dangerous AI risk is not accidental loss of control but our deliberate choice to allow AI systems to engage in recursive self-improvement (RSI), where they autonomously design and train ever more powerful successors. The author contends that because we already struggle to understand and control current frontier models, letting them improve themselves would rapidly push capabilities beyond human comprehension and oversight, so RSI should be banned or strictly prohibited until safety can be convincingly demonstrated. The column situates this proposal within a wider debate in which some AI leaders call for “pacing the frontier” or even a moratorium on advanced AI development, while political and commercial pressures—and rival states like China—push for rapid acceleration.

“The Fates were laughing at me, at Athena, at all of us. It was their favorite bitter joke: Those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats.”

Klein's core argument is twofold: first that while major players foresaw the conundrum - that AI will outpace original human composers - they cannot let it go, lest other players incl. other nations - with less care toward its safety & its consequences -  win the race toward a vaunted "artificial general intelligence" (AGI, see Medium mini-series). And second we don't even have a language, never mind a consensus, to properly frame the arguments for or against.

Klein quotes words by Circe, pictured above, from novelized Greek mythology (Perplexity top): it follows the arc of Odysseus closing my Kuwaiti blog also quoting him. His predilection is correct: we need to know where we come from, to understand where we are going to; that was the tenor of my last mini-series on my Private blog.

It's also the tenor of his article: not going quite as far back as me, he also traces the story of AI; he reminds us that all that happened this summer - AIs going rogue - has been foretold a decade ago. I'd argue that Donald Rumsfeld's quote he refers to - we basically have "unknown unknowns" - is even more apt (Perplexity bottom):

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns".

The issue is that we simply don't know where the headlong race in AI  is taking us to: ironically, an attempted slow-down by its creators is not heeded by governments who could ultimately mandate it!

I argued in Medium that wisdom is the ability to hold two contradictions at once and still be able to function, because creativity sits in the tension in-between: those are in this case, our inherent intelligence that brought us here, vs. AI some propose it take us to the next level; it seems obvious to me that not only will AI collapse that contradiction to its own singularity - and it going rogue this year only makes my point - but also that we're willing to let tech bros do it for us... As Ezra Klein said, "we're not losing control, we're giving it away"!

I used to worry about climate change - Extinction Rebellion scientist 10-5 yrs ago, see Main blog and Google Docs - but now I worry about AI before man-made Greenhouse Gas, Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current (AMOC) or Super El Niño (James Hansen's Substack an excellent starting point).

That is why the preceding mini series - listed in my main blog's featured AI blog post - is a good place to wrap up my AInternet (= AI + Internet) experiment: ... Thanks for reading!

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Series index: “The tiger eating its tail” — AI doom loops and the rare‑book grab

This five‑part series explores how AI’s “doom loop” dynamics are driving a quiet but significant grab on rare and out‑of‑print books, and what that means for cultural heritage, law, and historical‑GIS research.

Post 1 — “The tiger eating its tail”, or how to break out of the “AI slop cycle”

Focus: Introduces the Indian folk image of the child and the tiger circling the tree, then frames the AI doom loop and the emerging “buy → despine → scan → discard” pipeline for rare books.

Read Post 1 →

Post 2 — Mapping the AI rare‑book pipeline: cases, regions, and policy fault lines

Focus: Maps documented actors and channels (AI labs, data vendors, used‑book wholesalers, libraries), compares regional contexts (U.S., Europe, others), and outlines library, legal, and policy angles.

Read Post 2 →

Post 3 — Who owns the tiger’s tail? Copyright, fair use, and AI’s rare‑book grab

Focus: Examines copyright status of out‑of‑print but in‑copyright books, fair use and text‑and‑data‑mining exceptions (U.S. and EU), cultural‑heritage controls, and where the law may move next.

Read Post 3 →

Post 4 — When the map loses its footnotes: AI, rare books, and historical‑GIS research

Focus: Connects the rare‑book pipeline to historical‑GIS and spatial history workflows: risks to sources, marginalia, and reproducibility; opportunities if governance is right; practical stances for researchers.

Read Post 4 →

Post 5 — Further reading on the tiger, the tail, and the tree

Focus: Annotated links on AI doom loops and model collapse, rare‑book acquisition for AI training, copyright and TDM, cultural‑heritage digitization, and historical‑GIS/AI‑assisted research.

Read Post 5 →

Suggested reading order: 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5. Posts 3–5 can be read independently once you’ve seen the framing in Posts 1–2.