# Rosie DiManno: There’s no terminating the artificial intelligence takeover. I fear it will devour the world - Toronto Star

*Источник: Toronto Star*
*Дата: 2026-07-10*
*Язык: en*

**Кратко:** When I started at the Star as a teenage cub reporter a lifetime ago, we wrote our stories on Underwood typewriters heavy as anvils that were already decades old, the keys so stiff they could break your fingers. On triple-ply carbon paper, edited with a grease pencil, then rolled up into a plastic canister and shot into a crude pneumatic system that conveyed the copy to typesetters who could read backwards and ultimately delivered to the monstrous rolling presses.

When I started at the Star as a teenage cub reporter a lifetime ago, we wrote our stories on Underwood typewriters heavy as anvils that were already decades old, the keys so stiff they could break your fingers. On triple-ply carbon paper, edited with a grease pencil, then rolled up into a plastic canister and shot into a crude pneumatic system that conveyed the copy to typesetters who could read backwards and ultimately delivered to the monstrous rolling presses.
Pressmen wore newsprint hats that caught ink splatter.
I could feel the presses vibrating beneath my feet.
If working the night shift, or maybe just boozing and smoking for hours in The Print Room, a windowless watering hole on the first floor of One Yonge Street — then booted into the garishly lit back bar — we’d wait for copy boys to bring down the first papers off the presses, still warm, damp and smelling divine.
As time marched on, I adapted to the introduction of computers, starting with the indestructible RadioShack Model 100 laptop. You could throw it off the roof — tempting — and it still worked. With rubber couplers muscled onto a headset to file from a phone booth. They’re mostly gone now too, phone booths.
Followed by so many iterations of bewildering digitized systems that I’ve totally lost the plot and, more latterly, integrated workflow platforms with names like Blox that I haven’t even bothered learning. Digital schmigital. I don’t produce content, I write stories, if increasingly smashing into the rock face of word police editors. Blogs and vlogs and presto rolling files for mobile devices, web pages on the fly and audience analytics, I can deal with, by which I mean ignoring the whole lot.
But it’s the quickening of artificial intelligence that has me in a death swoon.
This was our first major foray into artificial-intelligence-assisted investigative reporting.
The Star, like every other media entity, has cannonballed into the AI pool, albeit with restriction commandments. Newspaper managers genuinely believe they can keep the beast on a leash. I fear they’re catastrophically wrong.
AI will devour the world, newspapers a mere amuse-bouche.
I read an article recently in The New Yorker by writer Stephen Witt, about the advent of autonomous humanoid robots with articulated hands and a swivelling head, the latest generation of “physical A.I.” coming out of Silicon Valley. This particular ingenuity — “Neo” — is almost huggable, deliberately non-threatening, though not trustworthy around children and small pets.
Many of us do find the very concept of these replicants — springing forth from the unrestrained genius of tech-brains, like the ancient Greek goddess Athena from the forehead of Zeus — viscerally frightening. Even if all this beta version might amount to is Rosie, the robot maid from The Jetsons.
Where will the real maids find work?
Already there’s a booming digital afterlife industry — deathbots — interactive avatars of loved ones created by feeding in “digital remains”: emails, texts, voice notes and years of passive metadata from social media. Life eternal, or a chimera of it, and never having to say goodbye.
When first I encountered robot technology — at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 — it was no more than a curiosity, a novelty, mechanical busy bees preparing meals in the media dining hall, capable of delivering dishes right to one’s seat. Last summer, Beijing also hosted the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, featuring androids from 16 countries competing in some 25 athletic and functional events. Which I suppose is just a hop-step-and-a-jump from robo umps now calling strikes and balls in Major League Baseball.
In Italy, 1.2-metre-tall “Alter-Ego” robots, driven by AI, are already being deployed as hospital nursing assistants, ostensibly to perform drudge tasks and alleviate a labour shortage so that actual humans can devote more time to patient care.
Would you want a ‘droid changing your bedpan and monitoring your vital signs? What if it turns off the life support ventilator?
We’re surrounded by AI incursion, even if it doesn’t cognitively register in our wearied brains: medical imaging to “augment” radiologists, traffic mapping apps, generative writing and editing models that spit out news stories, eliminating the need for an actual reporter (this is not done here at the Star), e-commerce retailers such as Amazon that use customer support chatbots, virtual agents in the travel industry, fraud detection and background screening by financial institutions.
Society flooded by AI deepfakes and propaganda to malignly influence elections.
Inch by inch, leap by leap, AI — humanoid robots just part of it, our cities colonized by vast data centres — are making the jobs we hold redundant. Ultimately, with the thinking skills we compute into them, making humans redundant.
AI systems that could act unpredictably or evolve beyond human control, i.e., the rage of the machine and human extinction.
This isn’t “The Twilight Zone” paranoia. This is “The Terminator” come to life.
I still have my old Underwood. Even an out-of-circulation Star coin-vending box.
In a digital newsroom, all those tech-hip young reporters, I’m a relic too.
And you can’t wrap the fish in a webpage.

[Оригинал](https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/theres-no-terminating-the-artificial-intelligence-takeover-i-fear-it-will-devour-the-world/article_dfe68084-4655-412d-a741-15ab1b776b70.html)