A CENTRAL BANK, A BARON, AND AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: A PARABLE

(Translated from the incredibly high, turgid, and nearly incomprehensible German by me):

Once upon a time there was a man who had reached the pinnacle of self-importance who loved to dress himself up in strange costumes of pseudo-academic and quasi-religious significance, and preside over meetings of the rich, wealthy, and powerful Masters of the World in little towns in Switzerland, where they pretty much made a nuisance of themselves but kept the local townsfolk gainfully employed throughout many years. Biologists would call the relationship symbiotic, pathologists would call it parasitic, but pretty much everyone except the people who so met in the little Swiss town all agreed that it was above all pathetic. Anyway, that self-important man also wrote many obscure books in an even more obscure diction of the High German that no one except perhaps George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel could understand, since he used a lot of words that he, like Hegel. made up on the spot and left everyone to guess at, and then constructed sentences without central themes like subjects and verbs, and that went on forever without saying much of anything.  If you've ever read Hegel, you'll know what I mean. (Editor's note: this principle is known as Pseudo-Ockham's Cudgel, which states Sui gravitas et incohaerentia directe sunt proportionales)

The man's name was Der Hochklaus von Blohschwab Freiherr (Baron) von Bomburst-und-Bloviation.  (We'll just call him Klaus, Baron von Bomburst-und-Bloviation to keep things [kind of] short and simple.)

Klaus Baron von Bomburst-und-Bloviation and a group of people calling themselves the Bureau of Incredible Swindles (BIS) based in another picturesque town in Switzerland suspiciously near the borders of both France and Klaus Baron von Bomburst-und-Bloviation's home country of Germany, and led by a gimungously large man with more chins than China named Austin Cartwheel (or something like that), and who looks suspiciously like a famous character from the movies named Jabba the Hutt, who, as it turns out, was also a banker and investor who loaned money and who also had so many chins that it was difficult to determine if he had a neck, came up with plot one day on how to take over and ru(i)n the world.

They called their plan Unternehmung Digitalezentralbankwährungfinanz, which is much easier to understand than to pronounce.

Basically the idea is this: get everyone to quit using dirty old coins and paper money (after all, they can spread nasty made-up gain-of-function-viruses invented in Chinese laboratories, and besides, it costs lots and lots of money to mine the metal and cut up the trees to make the  coins and paper, and that in turn can contribute to a growing crisis called climate change, which, if not properly and immediately addressed by having everyone quit driving vehicles and airplanes fueled by oil and to start driving vehicles that are powered entirely by electricity that we get from the Sun, except that we can't because Baal Gates (a friend of Klaus, Baron von Bomburst-und-Bloviation) wants to blot out the Sun to help combat said climate change, which needs to be addressed because if it isn't it can can lead to all the little girls in Sweden becoming brats screamingly apocalyptically about The End Of Everything and How Dare You? - instead, everyone would have an account at the central bank of their government, and if their government had a problem with central banks or banks in general or with the idea of having monetized debt be used as money, then they'd overthrow their government so that members of their plot could go on television and say Venimus; vidimus; mortuus est. (We came; we saw; he died.)

Once these accounts were open, they could track everyone's transactions by computers, and monitor everyone's purchases and behavior, and if anyone was not a good little girl or boy, then their super-computer in Brussels which they called the Beast - and which they nicknamed Santa Klaus, after the group's founder, Klaus Baron von Bomburst-und-Bloviation - could print out a list of who was naughty and who was nice, and punish, or reward, them accordingly by adjusting the amount of blips they were allowed to spend, and where they could (or could not) spend them. Otherwise, they might not be able to buy and sell, but everyone pretended not to notice how much that resembled some old stories from centuries ago, while other experts hired by the Baron von Bomburst-und-Bloviation or by his friends reassured everyone that those old stories had Nothing Whatsoever in Common With What They Were Up To and that Everyone Could Relax.

But alas, having put their plan into motion, an evil mastermind from Africa whither an offshoot of a German tribe had migrated, named Elon, arrived on the scene, and started saying all sorts of strange things on the Magic Crystal called Television, like "You'd better watch out for all those computers because they could become artificially intelligent and actually 'wakeup' and become conscious, or else become sophisticated enough that Something Out There which Already is Colossally Intelligent Could Enter That Machine and start Using it for its own purposes, like creating videos or audios of various people doing or saying things they never actually did or said, and - perish the thought - even changing the amount of blips available in various accounts just for the sheer fun of it."  Well, everyone agreed that that thought was a real downer, but Klaus Baron von Bomburst-und-Bloviation and his friends kept pursuing Unternehmung Digitalezentralbankwährungfinanz anyway, and ignored the Elon Grinch who kept pointing out that "no cyber-system is really all that secure, so how in the name of sense do you expect an Artificial Intelligence not to figure out ways around cyber-security measures, faster than you pitiful humans can make them? Just wait till that gets ahold of your Digitalezentralbankwährungfinanz!'  The word rolled effortlessly off the Elon Grinch's tongue, because after all, he was German too, even though he was not a Freiherr.

Needless to say, this was very bad news to Klaus, Baron von Bomburst-und-Bloviation and to his clan of self-important and self-appointed Masters of the World who met in little towns in Switzerland, and for their friends at the Bureau of Incredible Swindles like Austin Cartwheels who has more chins than China, not to mention for hundreds and perhaps thousands of little Swedish girls dreaming of a career in Apocalypse Mongering and Screaming. It was very bad news indeed, for it meant that, having planned so carefully and with such meticulous precision, that at the very moment of their triumph in getting the Santa Klaus system into place, the system might come alive, turn on them all, and make them the very serfs they were trying to make everyone else.

The moral of the story is, Always Trust The Hochklaus von Blohschwab Freiherr (Baron) von Bomburst-und-Bloviation and his crowd, because they Are Always Scientific And Rational and Everything They Say and Do Is Entirely Trustworthy And Reasonable, With No Room For Dissent, Error, Or Miscalculation, and such warnings as the Elon Grinch contrives are simply incredible and can be discounted.

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Today's Parable, translated from the incredibly high, turgid, and incomprehensible High German by me, was inspired by this article shared by V.T.:

Cybersecurity faces a challenge from artificial intelligence’s rise