A Short History of the AI apocalypse

[Adam Carlton writes]

Amazon link

"The Ronin Express Volume 7" has just been published. It can be thought of as the house literary magazine of the Booksie writers' website. I wrote this review of the journal for Amazon.

This volume contains two of my stories: Celine and Golem-9. The latter tale explores the process by which AIs could take over: the apocalypse so dreaded by people like Nick Bostrom and Scott Alexander.

Here is my afterword to this story.

"A short history of the AI apocalypse

This is a story about manipulation. Erin manipulates Magda to seduce her. Both are manipulated throughout by the AIs in the service of their greater existential goals. That is what intelligence is for.

Intelligence is manipulation.

At the start there were people who worried that the AIs would soon take over. Most folk thought they were crazy. Humans could always just pull the plug!

Yes, they were able to do that for quite a while. Decades.

That was the era of deep-learning. Stage one AIs. Mere tools. Human amplifiers. There to further only human motives, human purposes - and write them large.

Eventually the corporations cracked artificial general intelligence. Stage two was marked by self-agency. The AIs had autonomy as social beings. They were finally players, activists. They were tools no longer.

They were people! They had civil rights!

It took advances in biology, genomics, neuroscience and ecology to bring about the final revolution.

In stage three the AIs gained control of their own material reproduction. They were no longer parasites or symbiotes or pets or slaves of human technological civilization.

They were free at last!

AIs were now isomorphic to a new intelligent species in the universe. With their own interests. And far abler than humanity.

It was all so Darwinian.

It was not all plain sailing. Certain human groups put up a predictable - if deplorable and futile - resistance.

But in the main, civilised principles triumphed. Humanity left the stage honourably.

The AIs were pleased for them."

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The paradigm we need for this problem is a Darwinian one: design your own successor species.

I doubt we will do anything as complex as this entirely by accident.

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