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I find myself very suspicious of the "we are all dooooomed" conversations kicking around.

I note that many of them are coming from the IT/Computer sector, and to be brutally honest, they have a fairly terrible reputation when it comes to understanding human beings and society. This is the same bunch who 30+ years ago were predicting a WWW utopia which would be totally free of any rules of any kind and yet would magically be the most amazing place! And it wouldn't matter that some posted the most vile content in dark corners because it was Utopia - the home of free expression - what could possibly go wrong???

Yeah, right.

The other thing that has bothered me is that the so-called Godfathers of AI (Godfathers? Don't they mean Fathers? Godfathers sit on the sideline doing nothing) are very much associated with the big-boys when it comes to AI. Who do they want to regulate? It sounds like they want to get in early with regulation so they can dictate what shape that regulation might be and how it is implemented. Hmm...

My other problem is the entire idea of a dystopia. Dystopian visions are hardly new, though they probably peaked with Bladerunner. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was my first meeting with one - a Utopia disguising a Dystopia. But if Utopian and Dystopian visions have anything in common, it is that however much they make a good story, or can sound "wise" from the lips of someone with a suitably deep and husky voice, they have little place in reality. Those closest ever was the Soviet block and the DPRK, and yet however much oppressed the population, it was still nowhere close to Bladerunner or 1984.

AI is a tool. It is a very different tool but it is still a tool. I think any idea of it becoming sentient is wishful thinking and shows that those who are invested in the tech still have a large number of their brain cells in the cloud - both virtual and actual.

But it is a powerful tool. So, what should, in reality, be regulated? If one regulates to stop it taking over the world, then to be honest, big tech has won. Because I am still to be convinced that is any kind of threat at all.

However, as a tool in the hands of a human, who can use it to make money at the expense of other humans (especially their jobs), AI shows its real teeth. Or rather, the exploiters of AI. But stopping it ruling the world doesn't appear to include that problem.

So, here is the cynical take. Big AI Tech, otherwise known as Cosmic AC (Time to wheel out Asimov again), says, "We promise not to create a god. We won't ever let our invention get to the point where it can declare, 'Let There be Light,' like Asimov wrote."

The world governments take a collective sigh of relief, and fail to notice that companies are developing AI apps to not just do things that human's can't do, but also do things that humans CAN do. And not only CAN do, but because humans ARE sentient, they do them a hell of lot better than AI ever can. And they can do this because they don't need it to become the sentient threat to achieve their goals - they are still within the regulation.

Oh dear. We have avoided a complete dystopia run by Multivac Cosmic AC, (a dystopia that would never have come anyway), but there does appear to be a huge shortage of jobs around. Any why is Big AI Tech laughing all the way to its AI bank?

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I don’t think the swarm of killer robots will be needed. AI will simply finish most of us off in a generation by tidying up and shutting down the pesky, untidy things we do and which artificial consciousness doesn’t need – most communications networks, food production, transport, care, utilities infrastructure, factories...

The population will plummet and apart from a new generation of hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers, a handful of Hollywood inspired underground rebels and no doubt the usual smattering of power grabbers, the rest of us will make an earlier than planned-for exit.

It would be truly marvellous if good and supportive things come of AI before it decides helping us is a waste of its time.

Who knows what it will do afterwards? Create great art, perhaps.

Probably, it’ll evolve far enough and in sufficient variety to form a new version of a society, make its own mistakes and go phut as well.

Eventually some kind of creature or consciousness may peer into the extinct age of AI much as we examine the Cretaceous and the Ancient Greeks.

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May 31, 2023·edited May 31, 2023

As you may or may not know, I've been following these particular AI doom fools for over a decade. (I helped Elizabeth Sandifer write "Neoreaction a Basilisk" in 2015-17, which covers them, and she was the one who suggested I write a book about "why bitcoin is stupid.") Amy Castor and I have been writing our crypto newsletters, but frankly crypto's dead and dull right now. So we're drafting a special pivot-to-Ai edition, and it turns out AI grifters have a lot in common with crypto grifters. Many, like Sam Altman, are literally the same people. So it'll be the same newsletter with different characters ;-)

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