Alternate question: who actually likes disaster movies? They’re terrible.

So I finally got around to reading that terrifying article about the impending Pacific Northwest earthquake from The New Yorker, and how can these sort of comforting thoughts not raise some questions?

In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it.

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Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.

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“Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

The part about the odds makes the reality of this particularly sobering. If those are firm numbers, and we are to the point of using phrases like, “when, not if,” and governments are historically bad at preparing properly for these things, what is a resident of Seattle or Portland to do?

You know a disaster is coming at some point in the next 50 years — and when it does, it is going to be catastrophic, and the odds are that something terrible will happen to you personally, and merely ‘being prepared’ is not enough to save you from some level of tragedy.

Assuming every passing day or month, the odds are ever so slightly higher that this will be it, what finally gets you to leave?

How long do you stay and enjoy the life you have in the city you love and gamble with your life?

Do you convince your friends and family to leave when you do? Do you stay if they won’t leave?

Saying, “It’s not worth it, I’d rather stay normal,” is for cowards.

After catching X-Men: First Class on cable the other day, I got to thinking about the classic “Which superpower would you want?” question and tried to think of a way to make it more interesting or complicated. Also, I really liked the recent Daredevil series on Netflix.

So: imagine some villainous genius/cosmic accident/industrial disaster gives you a superpower, but also leaves you disabled in some major way, either physical or mental. So for example, you can fly, but you’re schizophrenic. Or you are super-fast, but you only have one arm.

The bizarre wrinkle is, you only have your superpower one day a week. During that day, your disability vanishes. The rest of the week, you have to live with your new problem, and without that new superpower to make up for it.

If it matters, you can choose the day each week to switch to the super-you.

What superpower would you choose, and what disability would you be able to live with in exchange?

What would you do with your superpower, and how would you adjust to your new limits the rest of the week?

Hopefully no killer robots travel back from the future to prevent said ban.

And now for the flip side of the robots-replacing-humans coin. Not that I was going for an AI theme this week, but as it turns out, the world’s top AI scientists proposed an international ban on AI-controlled offensive weapons.

The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and professor Stephen Hawking along with 1,000 AI and robotics researchers.

The letter states: “AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of [autonomous weapons] is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”

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Should one military power start developing systems capable of selecting targets and operating autonomously without direct human control, it would start an arms race similar to the one for the atom bomb, the authors argue. Unlike nuclear weapons, however, AI requires no specific hard-to-create materials and will be difficult to monitor.

“The endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting,” said the authors.

Time to have all the arguments we’ve had for years now about the ethics of drone warfare, with a new and exciting layer of sci-fi conjecture.

Assuming the nations and corporations of the world all comply, is there any argument against this ban?

If the world can’t agree on an outright ban, what does the new arms race look like?

If AI weapons do move forward, what regulations or limitations would you put in place to prevent disaster — or even apocalypse?

They’re probably reading a story about a personified object like a train or something. How childish.

It’s been a big year for robots. Ultron was deliciously menacing and Spader-y; Terminators came back as they’re so fond of promising; and if you haven’t seen Ex Machina, you missed what is probably the best movie of the year (and which I may have to come back to in another post).

Those movies — and countless others — paint the robots as villains, as killers, as a sign of doom, the violent end of mankind. But what makes AMC’s new show Humans utterly compelling is how it subverts all of that. These robots don’t have a horrible agenda (mostly). They’re just really good at things. They do menial tasks we don’t want to do, efficiently and without complaint. They take care of the sick who need them. They’re hyper aware of their surroundings so they never hurt any humans, even by accident (unless they’re broken, in which case they are promptly repaired or replaced).

More than any other robot story I can remember, Humans brings to life how robots (or as the show calls them, “synths”) might end up being better than us not just at labor, but at the things we see as making us human — and as a result, taking our humanity away from us not by force, but by merit.

If robots can think and act more precisely, they can take over our most skilled professions, like surgeons or scientists — at which point, why bother trying to compete? They’ve stolen our ambition and aspiration. If they’re more patient, better listeners, and always make rational decisions about what’s best for us, could they be better parents than us at our most frazzled and frustrated? It might be better for the child if they take that away from us too. If a synth is totally loyal, physically perfect, and exists only for our happiness, then to an awkward lonely teen or adult in an unhappy marriage, how could they not pose a tempting alternative to the messiness of real relationships?

The show is a nice mix of mystery and crime story, science fiction and human drama, which makes it extremely watchable week to week. But what makes it special, why it deserves the most credit, is for making us consider how artificial intelligence might not take over suddenly and by force, but by a gradual superiority that leaves even us having to admit to ourselves: maybe they deserve it.

What would be the last things that only humans could do as robots get smarter and more capable?

What things that seem so central to your life now would you be happy to concede to a machine?

What would be the final leap they’d have to make before you could feel like you had a relationship with an artificially created life form?

Are some of the final things that make us distinctly human actually not so great after all, where we’d just be better off without them?

I can’t say why they chose a photo of a cheater looking at wedding photos instead of for a new mistress.

An especially tough ethical question today! Do we have sympathy for the victims of data theft when hackers decide to punish a site like Ashley Madison for making a business out of people cheating on their spouses? Or, as Heather Havrilevsky asks in NYMag, are we throwing stones when our houses (or in this case, our pasts) are made of glass?

As easy as it is to chuckle at a bunch of douche-bag dudes getting outed for cheating, consider for a minute the full scope of ramifications endemic to our new, easily hacked lives. Every last one of us is hopelessly vulnerable to hacking today, thanks to insecure smartphones; insecure databases; absurd, ever-changing, and increasingly invasive Terms of Service; and supposedly benevolent megacorporations that illegally suck private data off unsecured Wi-Fi systems and legally compile private information gleaned from multiple apps to sell it to data brokers like Experian who might, in turn, haplessly sell it to Vietnamese identity-theft crime rings. If that sounds like some kind of Orwellian paranoid fantasy, it may be time to wake up and smell your credit-card numbers hitting the Dark Web.

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This might be a good day for us to rethink our attitudes about the victims of hacking, whether it’s Sony’s Amy Pascal or the married dude next door, because the mob is coming for us, too. Do we really want to live in a world where no one is allowed to make mistakes? Are we arrogant enough to believe that we’ll never screw up? If we do screw up eventually, do we want our future personal failings to be judged and prosecuted by a self-righteous mob who may or may not share our values and ideas about right and wrong?

What rights do cheaters have in your mind, even if you are a person who says they would never, ever cheat?

If the answer is ‘they get what they deserve’, consider instead: what would you do if your most shameful secret was suddenly online?

Is there any scenario in which you, as a person being cheated on, would be able to get over it?

If the person you loved did it once, regretted it, and would almost certainly never do it again, would you want to know, or be better off never knowing?