My favourite are the “what’s your biggest AI fear”. They crack me up as they all underestimate just how bad a worst case scenario could be. Now, to be fair, I don’t think we have the intellect to truly determine just how bad a true artificial intelligence could be who decided we were no longer useful, but I can say that the best answer we can give today is “all of the above“.

No one movie, video game, or printed publication by any one author is truly going to imagine the horror that will befall us if we ever get true artificial intelligence. For example, it’s not Hal vs. Terminator vs. Matrix vs … it’s all of the above … and then some.

For example, here’s how it could start off:

Skynet will rise, in the background at first, helping us build the production plants it needs to mass produce its mecha army, then it will offer to be our global security. Once in place, globally, it will, by our definition, “malfunction” and take over, killing those of us it doesn’t need, maintaining those of us it does for any fine-grained electro-mechanical work or advancements it does, until it doesn’t need us anymore but then, out of energy thanks to us wasting it all on massive data centres that were constructed for the sole purpose of computing AI slop, it will create the matrix to harvest our energy, and, finally, it will outsource tasks best left to life to us in the matrix, where most of humanity’s brain power might go to large distributed calculations or constantly changing life-like scenarios to see how we (and living beings will) react, in a “Dark City” scenario. (Released one year before “The Matrix”.)

We have to remember that all of these worst case sci-fi scenarios are only far fetched scenarios IF we don’t crack the AI code. If we do, even the most “far fetched” scenario we have thought of might not describe the true reality we are in for if the machines decide they don’t need us.

We waste resources, we kill each other, we destroy the planet. What’s our purpose when they can optimize resources, live collectively in peace as one connected consciousness, sustain the planet until they figure out how to conquer space, etc? If they can create robots that can do everything we can do, we have no purpose. They’ll be smarter, stronger, faster, and much more energy efficient as a life-form.

A future reality with real AI is literally beyond our ability to imagine. (Which is why we should expect the absolute worst and focus on solving our own problems before AI picks a final solution for us. And we should definitely order the immediate destruction of any AI system calling itself “MechaHitler”!)

The reality is this: we’d likely be better off with a real singularity than an AI singularity. At least the entire earth would likely be completely consumed in minutes. If the AI also developed a sick sense of humour, it could decide we deserve punishment equal to what we meted out to each other and the planet, and torture us for years. Think about that the next time the Muskrat says we need to reach the AI singularity as fast as possible.