According to the Farmer’s Almanac, “The origin of Halloween … can be traced to Samhain, an ancient pagan Celtic festival that is Gaelic for “summer’s end,” a day to bid good-bye to warmth and light. It marks the end of the harvest season and the start of winter (the darker “half” of the year).

“The ancient Celts believed that the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest during Samhain, making it the ideal time to communicate with the deceased and divine the future.”

When the Romans arrived, they combined the old traditions with their own, and Samhain evolved into All Hallows’ Day, “hallow” meaning “to sanctify.”

Technology is not about sanctification, but there’s no doubt that there are some rather scary aspects to it. Here are a few bits that might frighten you:

Tales from the Crypto

What Halloween would be complete without Tales from the Crypto? Sam Bankman Fried, who ‘enjoyed’ his first full day on the stand last week in his $8 billion fraud trial, actually said, under oath, mind you, “I had absolutely no idea” how cryptocurrencies worked…I just knew they were things you could trade,” CNBC reported.

It’s no wonder that prosecutors in the case liken defense arguments to ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ according to cweb. And billions were entrusted to hm? That is scary.

Move fast and break things…

…Ask forgiveness, not permission. Those long-standing tech mantras might not be such a good idea when it comes to robo-taxis.

“Robo-taxis remain a pipe dream and greedy companies have only themselves to blame,” opined Therese Poletti at MarketWatch. “In a big setback for the autonomous-vehicle industry, Cruise, the AV unit owned by General Motors Co. said late Thursday that it would suspend all of its driverless operations around the U.S., not just in California, where regulators this week suspended its recently launched robo-taxis in San Francisco.” Why? Humans were being injured and bottlenecks were increasingly been created, “raising the ire of public officials, especially first responders, who said stalled or rogue cars have impeded emergency response efforts.” We are well aware of the first to market pressures founders – and their investors – feel, but how could these vehicles be put on the roads without being tested for safety ad nauseam? Scary to think what must go through those founders’ heads and what they might consider to be ‘acceptable losses.’ There are some cases where slow and steady wins the race. And this is one vertical where it’s especially important to know when to apply the brakes.

Be Very Afraid

According to Futurism, there’s an OPENAI TEAM TASKED WITH STOPPING AI FROM TRIGGERING NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON. Well, that’s good. The fact that it might even be a concern, not so much. “In a blog post, OpenAI said its new preparedness team will “track, evaluate, forecast, and protect” against AI threats, up to and including those that are “chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear” in nature.

“In other words, the company that’s at the forefront of making AI a household anxiety,  while also profiting hugely off of the technology. claims it’s going to mitigate the worst things AI could do — without actually explaining how it plans to do that,” said Futurism.

Now don’t you feel better?

Here’s a thought. While we do know that AIs are not sentient from what we’ve been told, no one understands quite how they work. In fact, even “Google CEO (Sundar Pichai) admits he doesn’t ‘fully understand’ how his AI works after it taught itself a new language and invented fake data to advance an idea,” said The Blaze et al. after Pichai appeared on 60 Minutes. Taking that from a dystopic and perhaps not all that unlikely perspective, what if the AIs view humans as the simulation, and as a rather imperfect species at that. Is that what’s concerning the OpenAI oversight teams?

May be time to be afraid…be very afraid.

Technology is racing into new areas at a breakneck pace, no matter the consequences, it seems. But the truly frightening thing is that these technologies are being readily embraced, feet first, and for the most part, without anyone so much as saying boo. Onward and forward.