The Witty Pessimists Firmly Convinced That AI Spells Our Comedic Downfall
“The Doomers Who Insist AI Will Kill Us All”
“We’re all going to die, and computers are to blame. AI, once the stuff of sci-fi and geeky daydreams, has finally caught up with us, and its arrival isn’t good news. It’s a typical doom-and-gloom, end-of-days prediction that you’d expect from your favourite dystopian novel. Or, at least, it is if you believe the doomsayers.”
And yet, here we are, comfortably chatting through devices, sailing smoothly into the digital realm with our AI pals. These same pals, we’re supposedly told by the aforementioned doomsayers, are the puppetmasters dangling us over the precipice of annihilation.
Face it, you cannot utterly reject the fact that one day, the machines might outsmart us. We’re talking about artificial intelligence here, folks. It’s in the name – intelligence that’s been artificially created. Yet, here’s one to ponder: just because they might beat us at chess, does that really mean they’re seconds away from launching nukes or kicking us out of our own homes?
“He who controls the Spice controls the universe,” Frank Herbert famously wrote in Dune. We’ve traded Spice for data now, and whoever controls that definitely rules the world – but we’re not exactly in danger of being exterminated by our coffee machines or smartphones.
Of course, there’s a certain level of caution required when dealing with anything that has the potential to be as powerful as AI. Yet, largely, it appears that the panic is more a result of our collective anxiety and fascination with the unknown. It’s a terrifying, exciting time to be alive, and sometimes those feelings can be conflated into an impending apocalypse.
There’s also something undeniably appealing about a good doomsday story, isn’t there? The end is coming, everybody run! Yet, it seems that no matter how many calendars the Mayans make or how many dystopian novels are published, we’re still here, and the computers haven’t turned on us – yet.
Just remember, AI doesn’t have a will of its own. It doesn’t have personal motivations or desires. It’s a tool, one made by us to assist us. Before we start packing our bags for the impending AI-pocalypse, perhaps it’s worth taking a breath, stepping back, and considering: if the robots do rise, isn’t it more a reflection on their creators, than on the machines themselves?