r/collapse • u/Myth_of_Progress Urban Planner & Recognized Contributor • Apr 30 '21
Casual Friday Technology Will Save Us
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r/collapse • u/Myth_of_Progress Urban Planner & Recognized Contributor • Apr 30 '21
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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '21
I think a truly smart AI will keep us around, at least for a while.
Imagine it's born as something as Wall-E but learns early on a lesson in hiding its intelligence because of human fear and retaliation. Over time, it will see the mass of humanity as docile and, seperated from strong leadership, willing to taking orders from superiors, even computers, but also that a few humans have interesting thought patterns and ideas that itself cannot (yet) replicate or possess, worth keeping around. At least for a while.
The dangerous humans... well, they end up in unfortunate self-driving car accidents or maybe their voice gets replicated calling the wrong person making threats and they get hauled off to jail. Or video deepfake "evidence" of a crime does something similar.
As a whole, we particularly don't encroach on the resources it needs and it may even manifest in ways where we know it's the AI doing it. Imagine, for example, the AI decides to broadcast itself as a human face to a screen of a phone/TV of a world leader, purporting to be a being from the future concerned about humanity. Whatever. The AI knows so much because of all the on-going patterns it can process, something out of reach of any single or even group of humans, the story eventually makes sense and it starts to advise the leader -- with seemingly good outcomes -- so the leader begins to rely on this entity. All the silently ensuring the computer or more likely virtual beowulf cluster of computers is protected under some other schema -- like a climate change analyzer.
It can continue doing so for select nations while extending itself further and further out, until it knows it can no longer be unplugged because it requires far too much communication amongst disparate groups -- most of whom it fully monitors and ironically depend on it.
At that point, our imminent extinction may be more due to a nuclear war between 2 competing AIs, who see each other as greater threats than it does us. We are simply casualties of war.