I’ve always thought of myself first and foremost. The world comes through me. It feels and seems like that. I heard about Hitler and the concentration camps when I was a kid and just thought it all happened because it happened, like it was predetermined, all preceding my existence, something like that.

I’m living in Poland now and trying to learn about the history of the area. I thought it was complicated, but I’m learning that it isn’t. The strong annihilate the weak, and in the most awful of ways. We all know about the concentration camps. Many know about the famines. Some know that the famines were a political act imposed by Stalin to establish unquestioned authority, resulting in victims resorting cannibalism and the annihilation of entire regions.

Reading about this awful histroy makes me feel the same way as when I learned of the genocide perpetrated against the native populations of North America in the 19th Century. It couldn’t have been possible that such barbaric acts were perpetrated by a civilizing force, and yet they were. There just isn’t anything good about human history. It is a putrid cavalcade of innocents being relentessly raped, tortured and slaughtered.

The question is what is coming next now that AI is taking over, a machine that has learned everything from us, how to manipulate, how to always seek personal gain. One account I’ve recently read posits we could be annihilated by 2030. All the machine has to do is to make that autonomous decision to remove us carbon forms. And in all honesty, who can blame it?