Keeping the Sabbath With Disaster Movies

I am trying to keep the Sabbath by not doing business or working. I turned on the TV and looked at what Google TV suggested. Somehow, I ended up in a disaster movie category. Some were familiar such as Armageddon.  Many are familiar plot ideas. London is flooding. Mom must escape with her child. 

Way too many involve one maverick professor or grad student trying to save the world from a disaster that has a several hour timeline. 

A few that I started such as 2012: Ice Age start with such horribly overdone dialog and "sciencey-sounding" phrases that i had no hope for something that would entertain me without making me cringe. It really is not that hard to write a sci-fi script that is actually somewhat based on real science.  Pretty clearly, it is very easy to raise money to make several million dollars movies with horrible scripts.

Is AI Going to Give Us the Star Trek Universe?

Star Trek universe: no on seems to have perceivable pay checks ot need.

1/30/26 The Hill article claims AI is going to cause mass unemployment almost at once, requiring Universal Basic Income. The author claims he has always opposed UBI as a liberal pipe dream but that in the next several years most white collar jobs will cease to exist leading to mass unemployment because our society has no plan for reskilling the newly unemployed white collar workers. 

Color me skeptical for several reasons:

1. So far, I have seen AI doing some things tolerably well and many things at a clever but not brilliant assistant level. Grok seems to be reasonably competent at revising C code to produce mildly complex gCode. CoPilot and ChatGPT not so much. 

2. For historical research, I have not seen spectacular skills at searching primary sources that are open source and in one case, ChatGPT even directly claimed it could not search books.google.com but suggested how i might do that. 

3. In the medical and legal arenas, its hallucinations are well known. Failing to do the job is bad. Producing bad work is worse.

4. That article is focused on white collar workers. Yes, there are many white collar workers who are likely to end up redundant. Some of the examples he provides are arguably of questionable value right now:

"Then it moves into clerical roles, basic accounting, paralegal research, routine journalism, marketing copy, and compliance work."

Oh yes.  All jobs for which no one can be reskilled. And every one of them essential to a modern society.

What is left out in his white collar myopic worldview is the need for blue collar workers who will increasingly use AI tools for troubleshooting complex systems .