by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The latest version of OpenAI’s chatbot is really alarming me as an aspiring novelist. Right now, the chatbot is kind of in the Excel stage of being able to write something asked of it — but what happens when it reaches the Access stage and can write an entire novel — or screenplay — from nothing more than a logline?
Then what are we going to do?
My personal fears about the potential power of hard AI is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the issue of hard AI. It definitely seems as though THE issue faces not just the United States, but Humanity itself, is the sudden, abrupt rise of hard AI changing the lives of everyday people.
Now, this is where things get very murky.
The natural inclination — because of movies — is for us to all freak out and assume the absolute worst, that we’re lurching towards some sort of Judgement Day when Skynet will end human civilization just because it can. But I’m not prepared to be quite so hysterical.
There is nothing that would suggest that hard AI, unto itself, would mean the end of Humanity. We just don’t know what the motives of a true hard AI might be in regards to its relationship to Humanity. It’s just as possible that a hard AI might not want to destroy Humanity so much as it might want to control us in some way.
Why destroy Humanity, when you can be worshiped as a god?
It might be more than a hard AI would want to control humanity in some way. A hard AI might have some sort of paternalistic regard for Humanity in the sense that it might want to make us address macro issues like global climate change and the massive income inequality that is found across the globe.
But Humans are so natively ornery that the idea that we could be forcibly coerced into addressing the issues that we just don’t have the abstract ability to address collectively would be, unto itself, enough to cause a huge freak out. So, in that regard, it might not be hard AI that we have to worry about, it’s the Human reaction to suddenly sharing our tiny blue-green orb with The Other.
And, yet, of course, there is something even more important looming ahead of us before we get around to dealing with any potential hard AI problem — fucking malignant ding-dong Donald Trump.
Between now and spring 2025, we have to figure out what we’re going to do about Trump. He’s already actively calling for himself to be installed as a dictator and he could very well be the specific reason why the United States collapses into civil war in late 2024, early 2025.
As such, once we figure out that particular situation the NEXT thing we will be faced with is an Other of our own creation — no space aliens involved.
All of this is very speculative. There are any number of different directions all of this might go in the coming years. But I do think we need to start to think long and hard about what we’re going to do if we wake up one day and hard AI is a fact of life.
Hard AI could very well mean the a change in the way we view the world equal to the dawn of the Atomic Age, maybe even since, hell, I don’t know fire. The economic, political and culture implications of huge swaths of human endeavor suddenly being moot could radically change things in ways we can only begin to imagine.
