The AI Apocalypse is nigh goes the panic-mongering, this time by insiders who should know better. In the near- and medium-term, AI is going to cost more jobs than it creates. Except that, empirically, that seems not to be the case. After an initial rash of AI-related job cuts, companies large and small are discovering that, while some basic jobs—data entry, for instance—can be done by AI, the larger number of entry jobs—picking products for sorting into shipping bins on a warehouse floor, for instance—are being done by robots, not AI. And those AI applications that are doing entry-level jobs—they need humans, slightly better trained than the AI or the original human clerks, to oversee the applications, ensure the AIs are doing the right things, and correcting AI’s errors when they do mess up.
AI applications were supposed to be better programmers than the humans they’re replacing—or supposed to be replacing. Except they’re not. AI applications can write pretty good code, but they cannot originate it in a program’s purpose, architecture, or design requirements and specifications. Humans are still needed for that, and human coders still are needed to proof read and correct the AI-generated code and to test and to oversee AIs’ tests of the code.
Next, we’re all supposed to lose all semblance of privacy from AI’s ability to crack all of our passwords and encryption algorithms. But this isn’t unique to AI; it isn’t even that great a threat compared to the real password and encryption cracker, quantum computing. Nor is even that a new threat; we’ve had our codes broken ever since we started using codes from the most primitive substitution ciphers. AI tools just do it faster, and quantum computing does it even faster. Yet even there, our privacy isn’t at that much risk. Folks who do know better already are working out encryption algorithms (and so passwords, as well) that can resist, effectively quantum computer efforts to crack. Oh, and some of those folks are using AI-centered tools to help them.
But, but—what about AI gonna kill us all in 10 years? Or sometime in the receding future? We’re still doomed?
Human civilization could certainly be hammered hard, sending us all back into feudal-like barter scraping by by cutting off our power, fuel, and water distribution networks. But how likely is that, really? Doing us in by cutting off our energy sources would simply cut off AI from energy sources, also. That, as AF709—Rhoda Miller—kept saying some decades ago, does not compute.
Actually exterminating us by hunting down the survivors would be a waste of AI resources. Even the attack on civilization requires extreme anthropomorphizing—there’s no reason to believe AI at that level of development would care about humanity one way or the other.
In the end, AI has no hope of controlling the resources it needs for its own maintenance, much less its growth. It cannot fabricate the computers it needs to host it, it cannot fabricate the components it needs for those computers, it cannot refine the ores and plastics and sands necessary to produce the materials for those fabrications, it cannot collect the sands or drill for the oil and natural gas or dig the ores out of the ground, and it cannot produce its own power for operating its host computers or the cooling facilities necessary for keeping its host computers operational.
However, if enough humans are cowardly enough to surrender to AI threats to produce those things for AI, or are criminally complicit enough to pay the AI vig of producing those things for their own remuneration, than our species will become the AI slaves or pets (or both) that we’ll deserve.
The more realistic problem centers on AI development competition. If we get panicky and slow AI development in the face of this hysteria, and the People’s Republic of China does not, the PRC will win far more than the AI race. This is the existential threat to us and to the West in general. PRC superiority with AI will enable the PRC to conquer us all in every way that matters: economically and politically, which will allow the PRC to dictate to us—to control what our nations do—and to impose on us conquered nations PRC requirements. And we’ve seen what that means for us from how the PRC treats the Tibetans and the Uighurs.
