Does that give anyone else here a sense of cautious optimism, instead? That maybe a better, smarter, kinder, more thorough, more optimized, wiser intelligence could one day take our species's place, and perhaps do a better job stewarding societies and planets? Humans haven't exactly been doing a great job at that.
Maybe this is a result of me growing up in the 80 and 90s, influenced by both the dystopian and techno-optimistic movies and video games of those eras (which continue today, with She and Ex Machnica and Transcendence and Portal and such, and of course Black Mirror). The general cultural zeitgeist tends towards dystopia these days, which is understandable, but a small part of me still finds comfort that maybe tomorrow will be better not in spite of but because of the new lifeforms on the horizon. Is that crazy?
I feel like we're witnessing the embryos of actual intelligent design, where genetic evolution by random mutation and fitness pressures gives way to algorithmic evolution towards other possible avenues of optimization, and each generation can inherit the sum total of its previous generations' learnings and mistakes -- something that is much harder to do with genes and culture alone.
Make no mistake... I don't see us living happily side-by-side with our would-be AI overlords, but rather eclipsed by them or perhaps subservient to them in some way (like the Matrix); at best we'd merely coexist with them the way that cockroaches and ants currently live with us, as co-inhabitants feeding off the scraps of a more powerful being... mostly invisible, occasionally squashed. It would mean the end of human dominion. But maybe that's a good thing?
There exists (tiny) philosophical movements like secular humanism and transhumanism, but those have nowhere near the mass appeal of mainline religions. Perhaps my ultimate underlying question is this: What if we could invent a better god, an actually benevolent being in the clouds who could give us better rules to live by, values to hold dear, visions to work towards... and hope for the future again?
Throughout history, humans have been like other primates: tribal and violent, primarily focused on in-group advancement at the expense of out-groups. Over time the in-groups have expanded somewhat, from cities to states to countries to federations, but we still lack the capacity for true planetary-scale collaboration. There's a lot of expertise and accumulated knowledge there, but our ancient biology and culture limits our ability to work together across 8 billion units. What if a robot god could better harness all that creativity and productivity better than we could?
As sci-fi daydreamy as that may sound, it seems to me a more realistic avenue towards "salvation" than hoping that our current socioeconomic and political engines will culturally evolve towards something sustainable for the species, instead of reinforcing our worst tribal instincts to the detriment of the species and our habitat. But that's probably just faith-based thinking on my part.
Would you, for one, welcome our new AI overlords?
Not at all. I have seen evidence that this concept has already failed our society. Large platforms such as social media networks, Darpa project platforms like Google and Facebook, Twitter, payment processing networks, e-commerce systems and more have already demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt that automated systems, laziness and cooperation with governments lend themselves to the creation of dehumanized processes that leave people stranded via low quality machine learning without any recourse. People ask on HN weekly how to deal with being locked out of said platforms. If multiple data-centers of servers can't solve this then I do not foresee walking and talking AI overlords doing any better. I say walking and talking because they would have to physically move once people lose confidence in banks and e-commerce. Currently that is a small percentage of people but the lack of confidence is steadily growing outside of the tech bubble.
Poorly regulated and ill thought out machine learning is already creeping into vehicles and homes. People have already lost control of how they heat their homes. Soon people will not be allowed to decide when they charge their EV's. People are already at risk of machines making fatal decisions and there are some cases where this may have already occurred but it is difficult to prove.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mqPSTJMjCA [video][2 mins]
If the comparison between ourselves and chickens is an easy one, it's just the exact same intuitive math, whether or not we can ever get our hands around the details. If you imagine it with science fiction level of detail, I mean you can make it salient for yourself. Just imagine an AI that is built by extrapolating from the best of human experiences, aesthetically, interpersonally, it's built from us, as us, but just gets better and better, such that, yes, it totally understands the love of family, and it can emulate that perfectly but it's even more connected to people than we are, such that it feels its family connection to all 8 billion currently alive because it sees everyone's genome and knows exactly who everyone's 100-removed cousin is and feels the implication of all that and understands how brief human life is and how poignant it is that we're here like mayflies for a mere 90 years but, in the case of this AI, it knows it can just draw energy from the Sun and it's got a good 500 million years left to roll here before migrating elsewhere, and it has all of that in hand, not just intellectually, but as a feeling of compassion for all sentient beings, how we're unlucky enough to be made of meat. I mean, just imagine a novel about this, and then at the end tell me that you can't get your imagination, or perspective, around what it would mean to say, "Ok, that being is more important than I am," and, if you made a trillion of those in some other galaxy, then, yeah, that would be more important than anything that's happening here on Earth, by definition, because any reference point you have for "importance" -- whether you go to family, or love, or not suffering -- it's there in a trillion fold, on the other side of the balance. ```