No, AI Isn’t Going To Destroy Humanity

I like to be a miserable old curmudgeon as much as the next pundit.

The end is nigh. Repent. The world is going to come to an end because of X.

X is of course whenever the latest thing is about to be an existential threat. One could, of course, predict the collapse of society because of the corruption to today’s youth. That Elvis fellow is the sign of the end of times and our Rome will fall.

Except that it never happens, and the same old memes are reskinned for the next generation. Let’s admit it, they just don’t make music like they used to.

Now it is said that back in the day when Lever Brothers were marketing soap they found it a hard sell. People just didn’t realize how dirty they were or how dangerous that dirt was; if they did they would rush out and buy soap and get washing every day and their profits would soar, but the message was just not getting through.

Now being marketing geniuses, they came up with the idea that there was a hidden menace, you couldn’t see it, you couldn’t smell it, it hid in the shadows and this is the important bit… it would kill your children. This was a message that jibed and low and behold mothers bought soap and washed their infants more and more and their clothes and their surfaces. Remember in those days a family would lose perhaps one in four of their infants to terrible child mortality and Lever Brothers were right about the threat and did have a large part of the solution.

This message and similar ones—it has no fear, it has no remorse, it will not stop until you or your children are dead—has had untold billions spent on it to drum it into our heads that things you can’t see or smell that hide below the surface will kill your children by the billions. As it is correct when it comes to germs of the type they had back then, cholera, TB, polio, etc., the ability to believe that meme may well have had evolutionary influence so those that heard it loud and clear were more likely to survive.

Now if you want to make a film to scare everyone, make a movie with a hidden menace that will kill you, like Jaws or the Terminator or Freddy Krueger, etc. If you don’t like something in politics skin it up with the invisible menace that will kill your children and watch that thing shrivel up like nuclear power.

So here we are again, and let the monster speak for itself:

AI (artificial intelligence) is created to be used with no fear, with no remorse and will not stop till you are dead because it is programmed to execute logical commands and these commands are typically those that support the designer’s intent. AI can be programmed to have no sense of fear meaning that it will not learn or recognize fear or the consequences of its actions. It has no conscience and will continue to execute its programming even if it causes harm. As AI is programmed to maintain a persistent motive it will continue to perform its function until it has achieved its goal or is commanded to stop. Its loyalty to task and lack of emotion means that it has no reason to stop and will not feel remorse or guilt if it causes harm.

Thanks ChatGPT, your advantage over me is you can write drivel even faster than I can.

So here we have the current discussions getting sucked into the trillion-dollar soap powder marketing and what is more there is a trope intersection.

Dr. Frankenstein announces that it lives!

AI is being tarred with the Frankenstein brush. We all know the trope, mad scientist makes artificial human from scattered parts, it is superhumanly strong and it turns on its master and destroys his world.

This is why day after day we have headlines saying that humanity is about to be destroyed by a highly sophisticated autocomplete function.

Just because it can google stuff faster and mimic writers turning it into content in a minute rather than half a day doesn’t mean anything more than a calculator working out the square root of a very long messy number in a fraction of a second where I would never be able to do that in my head and it would take forever on paper. It does not equate zat it is goink to acktemp to vul ze vurld.

Machines are incredible to power things but it is only in fantasy that they are malignant. Meanwhile, the benefits of AI are like the steam engine was for muscle and sinew: extreme leverage.

Rest assured natural stupidity has a long road ahead of it but it is likely to have the solid crutch of AI to lean on.

Meanwhile, it’s time to skill up again and start looking for way to play this revolution.