A group of so-called “experts” finally woke up to the apocalyptic risk of artificial intelligence on Tuesday, months after we started warning you about this growing existential threat to our survival as a species.
These people — not experts, because if they were experts, they’d have done something meaningful with their time — all signed a redundant digital document that states, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The statement was posted on the Center for AI Safety’s website, and it literally means nothing. Let’s pick it apart anyway.
Firstly, AI is not as dangerous as the next real pandemic. Pandemics can’t be stopped by turning the electricity off, whereas mitigating the threat of AI is literally more simple than that. In fact, mitigating the threat of extinction from AI is as easy as just not developing it. But of course, where would the fun be in that?
The threat of extinction from AI could theoretically come from multiple sources. The first is the true dystopian nightmare, where robots evolve into a Matrix-style hellscape. I don’t think the planet has enough raw materials to do this sustainably, so I don’t lose sleep over this potential apocalypse.
Daily Caller’s Kay Smythe Says Society Will Be ‘Useless’ If AI Robots Take Over Journalism | @DailyCaller
@JohnFBachman @NEWSMAX 🤘🏽🇺🇸 https://t.co/n66Ldi2wII
— KAY SMYTHE (@KaySmythe) January 31, 2023
What does concern me is the existential threat to modern civilization posed by AI. I know countless young Americans in hideous amounts of debt for various degrees, usually related to coding, marketing, advertising, business management and other related fields that could easily be replaced by AI.
IBM has already opted to replace almost 8,000 human jobs with AI. There are myriad reasons why a huge number of working-to-upper-middle class careers will also disappear in the next decade for the same reason. When this happens, millions of people will be left with no transferable skill set, and no hope.
Sure, we might be able to create more recreational opportunities for ourselves to thrive without work, but then we’ll become dependent on robots to do the jobs we don’t want to do. We’ll become even lazier, and lose the last remaining survival knowledge we have.
Then, when AI crashes or the next big solar storm smashes through all our technology, we’ll be screwed. We’ll slowly collapse as a civilization, with many starving and succumbing to waterborne illnesses, ancient viruses and the violence we inflict on one another.
It won’t be a sudden extinction like a mass nuclear exchange (another stupid comparison from the so-called experts); it will be slow. Perhaps within a generation or two of the New Dark Ages, we’ll return to our natural relationship with the world. And honestly, that doesn’t sound too bad right now. (RELATED: Dear Kay: I Just Lost My Tech Job … To A Robot. Help!)
I bet all the signatories of this AI statement feel really good about themselves, despite the purposelessness of their actions, and how tardy they are in finally recognizing the threats posed by AI. If only they read the Daily Caller! They’d have known about these threats years ago, and they wouldn’t look so stupid right now. Bless their hearts.