Today I glimpsed a headline along the lines of “AI is the asbestos of our time.” Which caught my eye because my daughter works in a lab with asbestos. Old buildings are still being tested for asbestos and decontaminated today, even though its use in the UK was broadly ceased in the 1980s, and asbestos exposure still kills a quarter of a million people a year.

Asbestos is an excellent fire-retardant insulator that just happens to kill people within twenty or thirty years. It’s been used for centuries. It’s not inherently evil. it was just applied to everything before it was properly tested or understood in the context of the human environment.

Asbestos was originally referred to in Greek as amiantos, meaning “undefiled”,[16] because when thrown into a fire it came out unmarked.

That sounds like us. We call the chthonic death fibres “undefiled” and we call the brain-murdering robot gibberish “artificial intelligence.”

It’s interesting to me to now think of the internet as a poisoned building.