GPs can request referrals to the private sector who bill the NHS. Through NHS Choices, the patient can request a NHS referral to the private sector. The cost is the same whether private or NHS. Under the NHS constitution, patients have the right to be treated where they want, according to what is most important to them (typically, do you want to be close to family or do you want to be treated more quickly). That doesn’t mean Harley Street, it means private hospitals providing services to the NHS
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I have a tooth abscess in a too narrow nerve system that my NHS dentist says they cannot do. They have referred me to an NHS hospital 40 miles away. They have written to me to say I am at the back of the list, one that may be 12 months long. Unless I shell out over £1000 for private surgery and follow up cap I will have an abscess eating away at my tooth and jaw bone and a few millimetres away from my brain until June 2024.
Are you saying that I can insist on being treated privately at NHS rates?
Back on thread…
“Experts” and “AI executives”. I always defer to them.
Nuclear war is going a bit far though? Isn’t it?
Computers are logical, usually.
AI living in them will tend to also be logical, but acquire some human failings along the way.
The planet is falling over, “soon” (define soon) it will be at the cliff edge. AI cannot help noticing this trend if it has been given license to roam freely.
One of several major reasons for the planet falling over is too many people. It is also the easiest to solve; reduce numbers. Occam.
The lowest-carbon quick-and-easy solution is global nuclear war to eradicate all the people infesting this nice planet. Covid failed, nature was not up to the job, so AI might look elsewhere.
Give it a few years and the planet will be green again, always assuming it won’t be covered in ice.
I hope this scenario doesn’t happen “soon” (define soon)… 
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Stephen Hawking believed AI was the the only way Human Kind would survive.
Was it a true story?
One night the early warning system in the Soviet Union picked up dozens of incoming ICBM’s. The guy in charge had just seconds to decide what to do. Initiate mutual destruction or go outside and watch the show. Thinking that we were all doomed anyway he watched the screen as the missiles rained down. He went outside to view the sky. Nothing. It was an IT glitch.
He said that it was lucky that he was one of the few civil servants there. Had one of the military personnel been on duty they would have acted logically and by the book. They would have reported it.
I wouldn’t be typing this now. Got bless those human beings who were taught how to think, not what to think. A vanishing breed.
Get a referral through your GP
https://dental-referrals.org/patients/patient-choice/
But he might refer you to a private hospital offering dental surgery 400 miles away.
What you are after is unlikely to be offered in a normal private dental practice.
Were the “rise of machines” to arrive at a point that they had conscience enough to decide that humans were bad for the planet and needed to be removed then it would be logical to assume that machine conscience would also want to survive any apocalyptic event, or why bother in the first place? Creating a nuclear war, which would destroy primary power sources, burn out pretty much any un hardened circuitry, including those required for telecommunications, robotics and pretty much anything else with a semiconductor, would not be the route to long term survival. It also wipes out most other life on the planet, so again, not really achieving the primary maleficent goal.
Far better to engineer a biological solution, one that can be targeted to your primary goal and one to which would have no effect on your circuitry.
Yup, sort of. Happened during Operation Able Archer; a NATO exercise that simulated a reaction to a Soviet ballistic attack, generating radio chatter. The was 3 weeks after the Soviet airforce shot down a Korean 747 that had “strayed” into their airspaced. These events put the SU on edge. A new early warning system, OKO, confused weather patterns with a NATO first strike. Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was on duty that night, and dismissed the alarms as an error. So he was military, although a conscript, and not a civil servant, and he used his own gumption. There was never a Red Button.
Its argued that the Soviets had further safeguards, and that a counterstrike would only have been launched followed a confirmed nuclear detonation on Soviet territory.
James Lovelock’s last book was Novacene, where he discussed the emergence of AI as a new life form. Lovelock was likely Britain’s greatest scientist since Newton, a true polymath. And an optimist at the end. He suggested we are currently living in the Anthropocene age, the age where humans effect changes to the environment, good and bad, and this age is coming to an end. This will be replaced by the Novacene age; the age of machines. Continuing on from his Gaia hypothesis; that the Earth and its geochemical cycles is similar to the living cell and homeostasis, he proposed that the new overlords of the Novacene will conclude that it is in their electronic interest to maintain a steady status (the environment that is essentially manmade), and therefore keeping humans around, to keep farming and whatnot, is advantageous to them. In addition, runaway climate change is also harmful to electronic life forms so they will likely concoct engineered solutions beyond the wit of humans.
In a virtual test staged by the US military, an air force drone controlled by AI decided to “kill” its operator to prevent it from interfering with its efforts to achieve its mission, an official said last month.
(AI-controlled US military drone ‘kills’ its operator in simulated test | US military | The Guardian)
They need to teach it Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.
Edit: Although thinking about it, I’m not sure the three laws would prevent destruction of communications towers! 
Edit2: I need to engage my brain - drones are designed to (among other things) kill people, so they couldn’t be programmed with the three laws! Duh!!
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More on the artificial stupidity story mentioned by Terry above :- AI drone 'kills' human operator during 'simulation' - which US Air Force says didn't take place | Science & Tech News | Sky News
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Reading the above posts, I am reminded of the Tom Lehrer existentialist song, “We’ll all go together…”,
written during the Cold War.
We only have one habitable planet. 
As a species, we are sometimes far too inventive for our own good, and although this has enabled us to achieve great things, it could also be our downfall, if we continue to develop technology and biotechnology that is hard/impossible to regulate. I don’t have any answers for this. Wish I did 
We don’t consider the possibility of unintended consequences, in all the choices and actions that we as individuals make. Also there are far too many of us - but we can all strive to live in the least harmful way we can. Some times the choices are hard.
Humanity is resourceful - we have an amazing world, and science and all technologies can be a powerful force for good.
Now if we could only develop economies that are not predicated on exponential growth, and honest politicians with the greater good at heart… 
Lecture over! 
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Don’t stop there, sounds like you are about to step it up a gear 
In the hands of those who have a moral compass and who are not wholly concerned with expanding their own economic or political power base.
Example. “Snail mail” was introduced in the 1840’s. 180 years later it takes between 1-2 days for first class mail to arrive. If I send an email to an organisation I have been recently getting a message back (immediately) telling me they are sooooo busy, many still WFH and they aim to reply within 10 working days. This is usually with larger organisations.
No telephone contact, all on-line, so a conversation that used to take a minute can now take several weeks.
180 years of “progress”?
I’m still a telephone user!!! 
Progress is relative, and horrible when it prevents people who do not have the current technologies, from using car parks, applying for vital services etc, etc…
Hence my comment - we need economies that are not predicated on exponential growth, and honest politicians with the greater good at heart.
Bring back manual chokes, that’s what I say!
I know you jest, but even the dreadful automatic choke in our old Mk1 Cavalier was an improvement on the manual choke in the woody Mini traveller before it.
After pulling it out every time to start the car, even with a hot engine, SWMBO never bothered to push the Mini’s choke lever back in.
Eventually I added a little spring on the other end of the cable and engine vibrations helped slowly pull the lever back. The Mini became a lot more economical, going from about 25mpg to about 45mpg.
I’d prefer hot tube ignition personally.