Project Cassandra and Black Swan events  - Blair McPherson

Six years ago the German military launched Project Cassandra, a programme designed to predict disasters and black swan events by getting novelists, poets and journalists to write stories about them. If military and intelligence services believe fiction can act as an early warning sign of future disasters then we should be very worried about AI. 

 

Once machines learn to think or are programmed to put the mission first the message is our days are numbered. The most obvious example is the film Terminator. Once the machines all talk to each other the network decides humanity is a virus. 

 

But it’s not just AI that is out to get us.If the thinking behind project Cassandra is credible then we should be very worried about the forth coming Zombie apocalypse. Which apparently now seems more likely than the nuclear Agamemnon precipitated when a rogue nation acquires The Bomb. And don’t get me started about the much headed alien invasion. As John Wane once didn’t say, “the only good alien is a dead alien.” 

 

Of course it doesn’t need intelligent machines, brain dead zombies , nuclear war or genocidal aliens to end life on earth as we know it. Far more frightening is the future predicted by A Hand Maidens Tale because everything in the portrait of a hellish future is based on things already happening in different societies around the glob. All the author has done is brink it together in one country. 

 

May be that’s why Project Cassandra has been closed down, officially any way. We are just too good at imagining the worst. If only novelists, poets and journalists gave more time and attention to imagining a better future. But the that would be a very boring story. 
 

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