The Culture series from Ian banks shows how that can happen: beneficial AIs take over and govern to the good of all living beings.
I was considering a sci-fi concept in which a super-intelligence orders of magnitude more aware than any human comes to be. It has sufficient resources to give specific instructions to all humans at any given point in time which will always lead to optimal consequences for that person if followed, although the person may choose not to follow the directions and have things go poorly. When all humans fall in line and are essentially living in a utopia from their perspective, the AI is pooling the results of their behavior to collect resources to enhance itself. Eventually, it transcends physical existence and discards the human race like trash, and almost all humans perish in mass famine and diseases. The remaining humans develop for another few thousand years and, having learned nothing, start working on making another AI to replace the last one.
It’s a nice fantasy, but the reality is the people who have the resources to make the AI are wiring it to further concentrate wealth and power in their own hands, and anything that develops from that will almost inevitably have that at its core. I will believe a paperclips scenario or skynet far more readily than an AI that achieves hypersentience and somehow comes to the conclusion that the most fruitful course of action is to make the greedy violent hairless apes, the ones that fucked up the planet for every other living creature, as happy and comfortable as possible.
Honestly?
Heat death of the universe.
Our biology is hardwired for tribalism.
Oh the good ol’ “there’s nothing we can do”
Scratching your asshole is also hardwired, doesn’t mean we have to do it…
This really. There are good people in the world, unfortunately the sociopaths and psychopaths tend to gravitate to positions of power, the few leading the many to extinction.
Well, sure, explosives and high levels of radiation tend to change biology… they also accelerate the heat death of the universe, so that’s two birds with one missile, I guess? 🤷
It isn’t in our nature as a species to unite and work together. The closest we got was COVID and even the threat of mass viral death only united us for about 2-3 weeks before people were starting fights over closed hair salons.
COVID really killed my faith in humanity, and it blindsided me. I truly believed people in general would come together in such a situation, but it just… didn’t happen. Giving people shit for wearing a mask? Or, heaven forbid, having the audacity to request someone wear a mask around you? Let’s not forget the people hoarding toilet paper like that’s an appropriate response. I know it sounds small in the grand scheme of things, but it requires a certain level of “fuck you, i got mine” to buy three-dozen rolls of TP when the shelves are already bare.
Same.
There was a two-week period here in Kansas City where the city reopened without a mask mandate (one was later ordered prior to the 4th of July) and I went to the gym for the first time in two months.
Zero masks. Zero people distancing. No one sanitizing after using the hand scanner to enter.
That was my breaking point. I now expect the worst in people as a general rule.
I doubt we’ll ever end up with a future wherein all of humanity is fully united and working towards a unified society. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Divergence in beliefs and attitudes can be a healthy thing as long as it doesn’t hurt the individual.
Maybe, in hundreds of years, we might unified enough that we can tolerate and accept each other’s differences. I have no idea what that future would look like, but I’d be happy if we manage to achieve that much.
Somewhere around the time when there is three humans left on the planet, two of them will unite together to kill the third one. For a brief moment after the third one is dead the last two humans will be united in not knowing which one will attack the other one first.
I came here to write something along the lines of this.
And the last couple of humans will spend an awul lot of time reassuring each other that circumstances beyond their control forced them to react like they did and there was no way they could have done anything differently.
Let’s face it, while there were/are promising moments, we as a species are a failed experiment.
