Beyond Mad Max with dystopian AI

The dystopian future predicted in the Mad Max movie franchise may be closer than ever and it won't take World War 3 to make it a reality.

To me the only ones worth watching were the original and its sequel starring homegrown hero Mel Gibson. Those drab desert landscapes from Mad Max 2 on, were traversed by fast supercharged fossil fuel powered vehicles without a single EV on the horizon.

So while the Teslas pile up unwanted at Port Melbourne and sales of EVs are declining globally, they represent just the tip of the iceberg on which the Western world seems destined to founder in its mad rush to offset climate change "driven by CO2 emissions."

The fact that climate always changes and it's mainly driven by natural cyclical forces beyond our control, is overlooked by political leaders pushing the green dream of "renewable energy" focussed on the unreliable intermittent sources of solar and wind power.

Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris "Blackout" Bowen and PM Anthony "Each Way" Albanese would like to see an EV, electric scooter or bike in every Australian garage which would certainly keep our firefighters busy, but it won't change the weather.

As former chief scientist Alan Finkel admitted to a Senate hearing several years ago, if Australia cut all its CO2 emissions immediately, its impact on world climate would be negligible.

But in the unlikely event that EV sales do surge way beyond the current rate of just eight percent of total vehicle sales, it would place increasing demands on a power system already at risk of major blackouts. In its latest 10-year forecast, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) warned that millions of Australians faced the risk of electricity blackouts without the "urgent" delivery of greater energy and transmission infrastructure.

Well, that alone might not tip us into the dystopian Mad Max future but combined with a seemingly insatiable power demand created by a villain masked as mankind's new hero, it just might. I'm referring to Artificial Intelligence or AI - the charmless i-bot that answers almost all government and major business phone calls, the source behind our internet searches and algorithms, the brain behind the helpful tools that do a student's assignments or write a novel (badly) or create nude images of anybody from a normal photograph...get the picture?

Sales of AI software are tipped to reach $126 billion by 2025.

Google is just one of the search tools getting in on the act, as I found when accessing emails recently and received the following message:

Try the best of Google AI at no charge Use "help me write" in Gmail and Docs to quickly draft and refine content, or use Gemini Advanced to research and brainstorm using our most capable AI models. Try at no cost/ dismiss.

I immediately clicked "dismiss".