Of the many, many problems I have with the whole notion of AI, one that particularly bugs me is the baked-in assumption that if we were to build an actual artificial intelligence, then all this magical shit would start happening.
You hear these assholes on about it all the time. “Just imagine! We’ll be able to cure all the diseases! Solve the climate crisis! Unlimited free energy!” But how, assholes? How would that happen?
I mean, of course they have to say this shit, because otherwise, all their crazy schemes make zero sense. The only way to justify the massive Ponzi scheme of investment that is currently propping up the tech industry—and basically the entire economy—is to claim all these utopian outcomes will make it all worthwhile.
Absent that, they’re just a bunch of idiots burning cash to wreck the environment and destroy the economy.
The claims are basically magic, though. Sure—they are cloaked in pseudological arguments about inevitability and unstoppable forward progress, but that is because there is no way for them to actually make sense.
And if you dig down through all these fantastical claims, there is no way they can make any sense because they are, the their heart, emotional. These guys cannot deal with death, reduction, and loss, and so they have to spin these fantastical stories to convince themselves that they will never die, that everything will just keep on growing forever, that some magical force will come along to grant all their wishes and make it so they never have to examine their values and their beliefs.
That’s what these claims are—they are fantasy. The people talking about them imagine a future like the ones in Star Trek and Verner Vinge novels, and they want to think that because those are science fiction, they are a prediction of the future instead of what they actually are, which is reflections of and commentary upon the past and present.