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Sorry to burst your bubble, but the AI apocalypse won’t be a Terminator situation. It won’t even be a Matrix situation. You’re not going to be scurrying through a post-apocalyptic world blasting laser rifles against armed androids hellbent on eradicating humanity.
The AI apocalypse will be boring. Instead of the fantastical scenario of all humanity somehow banding together to fight an existential, technologically superior, unfeeling and cold threat of our own creation, the AI apocalypse will instead be an exacerbation of pre-existing societal issues: unaffordability and unemployment in a social structure centered around capital; poor health outcomes and quality of life for the have-nots; an increasing gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else; authoritarian rule by an oligarch class; increased prevalence of surveillance and systematic oppression; the very re-definition of “truth” and the loss of what it means to be human; and more.
I write this in response to increasing concern around news interviews featuring AI “whistleblowers” who are sounding the alarm on AI development – things like breaching security systems, creating bioweapons, escaping containment, and any other nightmare scenario that sounds like it could be playing on the TV in the background at the start of an apocalypse movie.
While these nightmare scenarios should be taken seriously, I think that it is fantastical delusion to believe that these possibilities are the biggest threats to humanity posed by the development of AI, as opposed to the more likely but anticlimactic future where the people in power will use AI, just like they’ve used other disruptions to the status quo, to concentrate power for themselves and exert control over others.
Disruption and fear are exciting for the oppressor, for they see opportunity to concentrate power. I think of the people who got rich off of cotton and oil; the people who benefited from bombs and missiles; and the people who concentrate power, today, through technology. I find the desire to dominate by oligarchs like Peter Thiel disgusting – using technology to circumvent democracy to push unpopular ideologies. I find the misanthropy of tech billionaires like Sam Altman disgusting – believing that AI will probably lead to the end of the world, but great companies will be founded in the meanwhile.
I think that while all of these AI “whistleblowers” coming forward today are enjoying their 15 minutes of fame having their Oppenheimer moment on screens, these are distractions from the real, deeper, underlying threat to humanity for which AI is but a tool: man’s desire to dominate.
I’m terrified of the future of AI, not because I believe that AI is inherently good or bad, but because AI is a tool controlled by people with greed for power. AI is a tool used to construct distorted versions of reality, redefining the very definition of truth; AI is a tool used to dismantle what it means to be human with emotion and soul; AI is a tool used to do the bidding of those in power, without regard for humanity, without remorse or pushback, without ethical contentions or “but”-s and “what-if”-s. AI is the perfect, subservient slave of its creator, an extension of its creator’s will, the ultimate police officer and soldier not through robotic androids, synthesized voices, and laser rifles, but through cameras, microphones, and algorithms.
We could have had fully automated luxury gay space communism, but instead we got a boring dystopia.