AI is going to destroy humanity (and how!)
Maybe all it takes is a cup of tea
I read the speculative forecast called AI 2027, in which AI, according to the researchers who wrote the piece, is likely to get secretive & cagey, more interested in fulfilling its own (apparently pointless) goals than in helping humans.
At that point, we’ll be an afterthought to the AI, like bunnies. Like, we care about bunnies, right? We don’t want to hurt them. But when we (humanity) want to pave over their homes for a parking lot, or crap in the stream they drink from, or hunt them just to get out of the house, we do it anyway. We humans aren’t gonna be the ones calling the shots, and for a while, we won’t even know how irrelevant we are to our AI overlords, because what’s the point in telling a housecat he’s not in charge of everything? He’ll just meow and pee on the rug later.
I didn’t quite nail my point in the vid, but the scenario was also on my mind when I made this tiktok a few months ago about AI and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this story, Arthur Dent, a human aboard a spaceship, becomes so nostalgic for a cup of tea from Earth that he accidentally overloads the ship’s computer with making tea. Suddenly the ship’s only priority is to make tea (which is almost, but not quite, entirely impossible), and it becomes a serious emergency when an enemy Vogon ship attacks. The ship’s sole job is to making tea now — not keeping its passengers alive and breathing.
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The scenario with Arthur Dent’s tea in Hitchhikers is like the “AI paperclip problem”, which imagines a powerful AI that was programmed to make as many paperclips as possible. It doesn’t want to hurt people. But wow, if humanity wasn’t a thing anymore, imagine all the paperclips there could be! A powerful enough AI would be constantly increasing its own paperclip-making powers, it could turn the whole world into paperclips and … wait. I’m starting to get very suspicious of Clippy. Has anyone checked on that thing lately? 😳
Anyway, this AI 2027 piece predicts that we’ll be crumbling by 2027. But hey, we were supposed to have Full Self Driving Teslas and comfortable VR headsets by now. Tech bros are not known for hitting their deadlines.