Whenever this topic comes up, there is a lot of hand-wringing as if the nightmare scenario were still in some misty future.
It's not. AIs already control the world. They have proven indifferent to the welfare of humans. Perhaps the most important developments in recent decades were their coming to own the majority of public media, and the high court of the one of biggest jurisdictions permitting them to bribe politicians secretly: in practice, to own pet legislators.
The AIs in question are called corporations. Their working parts mostly still include (readily replaced) humans, but decreasingly so. They have learned to manufacture voting blocs to drive political movements in nominally democratic countries to support their goals. By analogy to the paperclip apocalypse, they have a built-in motivation to turn all matter and energy into profit. Where their chosen method results in some service or product useful to humans, humans may benefit, but such choices may change freely, or may fail to change when the method turns out to cause net harm. Attempts at legislation to limit their power fail as they have taken control of the legislative process.
Is it too late to do anything? Probably. I for one ...
It's not. AIs already control the world. They have proven indifferent to the welfare of humans. Perhaps the most important developments in recent decades were their coming to own the majority of public media, and the high court of the one of biggest jurisdictions permitting them to bribe politicians secretly: in practice, to own pet legislators.
The AIs in question are called corporations. Their working parts mostly still include (readily replaced) humans, but decreasingly so. They have learned to manufacture voting blocs to drive political movements in nominally democratic countries to support their goals. By analogy to the paperclip apocalypse, they have a built-in motivation to turn all matter and energy into profit. Where their chosen method results in some service or product useful to humans, humans may benefit, but such choices may change freely, or may fail to change when the method turns out to cause net harm. Attempts at legislation to limit their power fail as they have taken control of the legislative process.
Is it too late to do anything? Probably. I for one ...