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Skynet is the good outcome

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

Will Artificial Intelligence take over the world? Only if we let it, I think.

And we’re almost certainly going to let it.

Our habit seems to be to capitulate to any form of power that dangles a short-term bauble of convenience before our greedy, beady eyes, even if it always seems to be just out of our grubby reach.

AI is dangerous less for what it is capable of doing now and more for how much power we concede it even when it’s stupefyingly shallow. We’ve given up before the battle has even been joined, conceding vast swaths of the intellectual landscape to an enemy that hasn’t even proven itself close to worthy of our respect.

That’s why we’re perennial losers. We don’t even respect ourselves.

Can you imagine how much power the AIs will have once they get really intelligent, once they stop messing about with making us buy things and think of more sinister purposes to which they could put their organic army?

We’re already more-or-less enslaved to our reasonably shiny and relatively advanced devices, offering the primitive content and experiences that they do. We have a complete paucity of vision and we’ve passed that on to our electronic offspring.

I’m not too worried about the AIs taking over what I do. I’m completely expecting everyone else’s capitulation to AIs to make the world we live in an even sadder place, flattened to a search-bubble homogeneity and bereft of risk or fun.

They’ve already gone a way toward doing so: wherever the algorithms have impinged themselves, they suck our time and creativity and pull us into a world just as programmed as our own.

How many decisions do you even make on your own these days anyway?

Robot armies striding the post-apocalyptic hellscape with conventional weapons trained on any furtive, mammalian movement seems like a very predictable and manageable end-game compared to the amorphous, digitized blob that is modern, Western life.