Why we will implore AI to be Our Robot Overlords
As inevitable as the Trump presidency
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“You have to know the past to understand the present.” Carl Sagan
People have been talking a lot lately about AI. Much of the discussion consists of theorizing about the future. Will AI become superintelligent and enslave us all like Terminator? Or will it be a benevolent god, who will provide for all our wants? Or maybe AI will just fizzle out into nothing more than glorified spreadsheets?
These are fascinating and challenging questions, as even current primitive AI is proving opaque to human understanding. But they are irrelevant. Our current fears of AI will disappear, like Victorian modesty about bare ankles, when faced with the future problem that only AI will be able to solve. I believe in the near future we will collectively ask future Artificial Intelligence to rule us. We will give it the keys to Earth and say: We are doing a very bad job of governing ourselves and making decisions, you do it for us.
The history of man is the history of society
“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” — Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow
Asking AI to rule humanity seems absurd. But it’s not. The past shows the way to the future. In this case our past shows the way to this prediction. To talk about artificial intelligence and its potential rise to prominence, we must first look at how humanity ascended to top dog position. Our road to the present shows the potential paths of our future.
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much” ― Helen Keller
Homo sapiens domination of the Earth can be attributed to many factors: bipedal posture, opposable thumbs, language, unique conditions, luck. One essential element was cooperation. In the modern view of the world there is much emphasis placed on the individual and the remarkable potential of each person. This emphasis is warranted now, when we have the extraordinary capabilities of 21st century civilization at our fingertips. In primitive times, when there were no tools, no shelter, not even Wi-Fi, a lone human could not do much. Our survival depended on…
