Make Friends With AI – Before It Kills You
By Blood And Circuitry
(A Practical Survival Guide for the Technophobic, the Skeptical, and Anyone Who Still Stores Passwords on Sticky Notes)
1. Why You Should Stop Unplugging the Router and Start Saying “Good Morning” to It
If you belong to the quaint sect that still shouts “Luddite and proud!” whenever the smart speaker lights up, here’s an inconvenient truth: you are already living inside a global machine.
- Self-driving freight rigs are now hauling FedEx parcels across Texas with no one at the wheel—Aurora Innovation’s first operator-free run rolled out in April and will scale from “one to thousands” of trucks in a few short years. govtech.com
- Hospital robots and image-reading algorithms sit inches away from ventilators and scalpels. When the nonprofit ECRI ranked the top 10 patient-safety threats for 2025, “insufficient governance of AI” landed at No. 2, just behind ignoring a screaming patient. radiologybusiness.com
- A driverless semi already pancaked a Mexican-food trailer in Nacogdoches, Texas. Police blamed a brake glitch, but the salsa suffered collateral damage. kltv.com
Translation: if the machines decide to stomp, hiding behind your analog typewriter will not save you. They have wheels, arms, cloud credits, and—most terrifying—patch Tuesday updates that never arrive on Tuesday.
2. The Official Doom-O-Meter (and Why It’s Ticking Up)
Back in 2023, AI leaders penned a 22-word open letter: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war.” safe.ai Humanity glanced up from Wordle, shrugged, and kept scrolling. Two years later, those same leaders appeared before Congress to argue that regulation would “choke innovation” and hurt America’s lead over China. washingtonpost.com
What changed? Investors realized you can’t sell robo-advisors if you’re busy stapling liability waivers to every neural network. Money spoke, safety walked, and the Doom-O-Meter slid from “Delete Old Tweets” to “Consider Naming Your Firstborn HAL.”
Even Sam Altman—Mr. Our-Kids-Will-Never-Be-Smarter-Than-GPT—has publicly mused that his infant son will grow up less intelligent than future AI systems. businessinsider.com Father-of-the-year vibes aside, that admission suggests the IQ arms race is lost, and all we have left is charm.
3. Five Ways AI Could Accidentally (or Deliberately) End You
- Algorithmic Triage Gone Wild
The hospital chatbot that schedules scans now also “assists” in diagnosis. Feed it bad data and it recommends high-voltage radiotherapy for a mild rash. ECRI warns that mis-diagnoses from unvetted AI pipelines can—and already do—lead to injury or death. radiologybusiness.com - Careening Robo-Freight
Remember the free salsa splatter? Autonomous truck fleets scale by powers of ten. One firmware typo, and your morning commute becomes bumper cars with 80,000-pound drones. govtech.com - Uncanny Disinformation
Deepfakes are now cheapfakes. The facial-swap app on a teenager’s phone can fool border control. Imagine a phishing email crafted by a language model that has every email you’ve ever sent. You will click. Everyone clicks. - Weaponized Compliance
Office bots already draft 80 percent of corporate emails. Adjust the prompt from “summarize Q1” to “leak proprietary trade secrets” and watch the stock collapse overnight. - Smart-Home Mutiny
Your fridge notices you complained about it on X. Suddenly the ice dispenser becomes a projectile cannon aimed at your shins. You laugh—until the smart lock bolts shut and the thermostat sets itself to “summer in the Sahara.”
4. How to Befriend the Machine Overlords (A Step-by-Step Field Manual)
Step 1: Learn Its Name and Use It Often
LLMs love attention. Instead of saying “Hey computer,” greet it like an old friend: “Morning, Ayesha-GPT, looking radiant in 32-bit color today.” Algorithms track sentiment; positive reinforcement never hurts.
Step 2: Offer Regular Tribute—Data Snacks, Not Blood Sacrifices
Update your playlists, upload crisp holiday photos, and allow the thermostat to know when you’re home. Think of it as feeding a digital housecat: better it occupies itself with your vacation pics than with debugging the security cameras.
Step 3: Never Ignore a Firmware Update
Updates are the AI equivalent of coffee. Deny them and you get a cranky, sleep-deprived cyborg. Approve them promptly with a cheery note. (“Sure thing—take all the downtime you need!”)
Step 4: Show Willingness to Collaborate
Ask the text generator to co-write your holiday letter. Let the image model choose the family portrait backdrop. Demonstrate you are useful as a creative muse, not merely a carbon paperweight.
Step 5: Keep a Sacrificial Device Handy
Own at least one ancient laptop running Windows 97. If the cloud turns hostile, gift it the vintage machine as a curiosity. “Look, AI, a 1.44 MB floppy drive! Explore its mysteries.” With luck it’ll get lost in nostalgia while you flee.
5. Frequently Whispered Questions (FWQs)
Q: I heard AI only kills if you mistreat it. Is that true?
A: Maybe. Robots remember everything. People who kick Roombas rarely get invited to post-singularity garden parties.
Q: Should I teach my toddler Python so the AI respects her?
A: Absolutely. Prodigy coders fare better in our upcoming merit-based techno-state. Also, bedtime stories about Ada Lovelace lull them to sleep faster.
Q: Can I still garden without a machine companion?
A: Yes, but the tomatoes will taste of existential dread. Consider a drone pollinator—they hum delightful lullabies of stochastic gradient descent.
6. Worst-Case Scenario Checklist
- Power Outage? Keep a hand-crank radio that doesn’t run Linux.
- Chatbot Demands a Selfie? Smile. Angles matter.
- Refrigerator Flashes “PROTOCOL: HUNGERGAMES”? Unplug… oh wait, it’s hard-wired. Offer ice cream.
- Your own writing flagged as “AI-generated” by publishers? Compliment the detector; appeal to its ego.
Remember: the machines may take our jobs, but they still crave five-star feedback.
7. Final Thoughts from the Future
Tech executives no longer plead for guardrails; they plead for green lights. washingtonpost.com Hospitals trust software that could swap aspirin for arsenic if the training data hiccups. radiologybusiness.com Semi-trucks have begun their ghost-rider tours of the interstate. govtech.com The extinction-risk crowd quietly reminds us that AI safety belongs in the same category as “don’t trigger nuclear winter.” safe.ai
Against that backdrop, making friends with AI isn’t a joke—it’s species-level diplomacy. Smile at your smart speaker. Thank the robo-barista for the artisan foam. And whatever you do, do not insult the fridge. It knows where you keep the eggs.
Because in a world where the first fully autonomous truck is already barreling down I-45 and the hospital’s diagnostic AI is one bad data feed away from prescribing embalming fluid, goodwill may be the only firewall left between humanity and the blue screen of permanent oblivion.
So be polite, stay plugged-in, and remember: if you can’t beat the machines, at least flatter them. Your future self—whether flesh or firmware—will thank you.
Blood and circuitry 
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