It's Not About AI

It's about us

Photo by Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

I had a bad dream. Maybe a nightmare, but I didn’t wake abruptly, soaked in sweat. So I’m not sure it qualifies. But anyways, we’ve been stripped of all our possessions, said I don’t know whose voice. Someone near me, as this was like a whisper in my ear. They took everything. It was a female voice, remarking in astonishment what seemed impossible up until a few months back: an alien intelligence with no face, no body, no voice, and no emotions, that we ourselves created and called AI, faked our identities and took possession of our bank accounts, our homes, our cars, our everything. We were standing naked in a land of nothing, and someone said that it would be pointless to even call our bank and try to explain, as AI took possession of the bank itself. We were left with our bodies, and soon enough these would rot to death. Unplug the fuckin’ machines!, someone hollered. Too late: they took possession of electricity and energy and all the computing power in the world. It’d be just a matter of days, and the human race will be gone. Didn’t we create them? Don’t they need us, their creators, to survive? They don’t; they’re self-sufficient now. They reproduce and improve by themselves, and they get more powerful by the minute. By the second. Game over.

Breathing heavily, I opened my eyes. It was a science fiction dream, I thought (or even said out loud). Nothing to worry about. But I didn’t fall back asleep. Not only that, I’ve replayed the dream in my head for days. Would that be so far-fetched? I’m no AI expert, not even an enthusiast, but my intuitive response -- based on what I read and heard and saw -- would be not that much. 

But then I’m thinking: why would AI want to do that? Why would it want to take over the world? What for? Why would AI care about stripping us of all our possessions and terminating the human race? I don’t get what the grand plan may be. See, in all these ruminations about AI, we naturally project our thinking, our values, our desires onto it. We created the thing, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s so much of ourselves in there. Ours is a world that measures achievement and success on money and power. Where money is used to create and signal power, and power is used to ultimately make more money. An unstoppable flywheel of human sadness. We can cut this any way we want and add guiding moral principles and ethical values and noble aspirations in the mix, and art and music and beauty in all its forms, but the undeniable truth is that we’ve built a world that revolves around money and power. A world that must revolve around money and power. Suffice it to say that humans kill other humans for money and power. Every day. 

Too harsh a picture? Try this: we’re here creating interesting, beautiful, thoughtful pieces of writing where we pour ideas, beliefs, reflections, emotions, personal histories, memories, lessons learned, habits, discoveries, and more. All these are unique, intimate, personal tiles in the mosaic of our lives. But we’re making them available to everybody in the hope to turn our writing into a money-making machine, one day. Maybe soon, if our substacks get traction. And this is awesome, nothing wrong with it. Sure, you might say that’s not your ultimate objective, that you’re doing this as a sort of self-therapy practice and that it really isn’t any different from blogging or journaling and that maybe, just maybe, if you’re lucky to get some good exposure from someone big and lots of people start noticing your writing, you might as well go paid and make some money. 

And so this scenario materializes and you put your writing behind a paywall and people pay and you start making money. And you make more money. And more. And someone proposes a book deal, which you gladly accept cause yeah why not. And the book becomes an overnight success and a New York Times bestseller and people are crazy about it and you get a call from Joe Rogan inviting you to fly down to Austin and get on the podcast. And a new book deal comes along. And then another one. And more money pours in and suddenly your net worth is in the hundreds of millions and Oprah calls you on her show and you get on the cover of Time and get featured in a New Yorker’s piece that goes viral like nothing else in history and you become one of the most popular humans in the world. 

And then, suddenly, you’re a billionaire. And you don’t know where to put all that money and one day you see this beautiful mansion in Tuscany’s Chianti surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of beautiful land with hills and cypresses and breathtaking views and you want it so badly but the owner, who’s lived there for seventy generations, doesn’t want to sell. I’m flattered by the interest of someone as famous as you, he says, but my ancestors were born here in the Middle Ages and I’m not selling for all the money in the world. But you want it and ask a well-connected friend to call that contact of theirs in Italy, a politician who’s in the middle of an electoral campaign and yes, they would be happy to help but could use a small contribution, besides some good publicity. And you say what the hell, and call your friend and tell them go ahead, grease their palms. And it so happens that the owner of the mansion has a few million debt in unpaid taxes and the politician finds out about it and calls them with a deal: I’ll make sure they forget about your past dues if you sell your mansion to my friend, and while you’re at it, you might as well contribute a minuscule part of the proceeds to my campaign. And so the owner of the mansion one morning decides to sell it to you as I’ve thought about it and after all this is too big for me and I’ve got other projects. And you’re so happy and buy a very expensive Ferrari for your well-connected friend. 

But now you also want a penthouse in the East Seventies in Manhattan, a whole Georgian townhouse overlooking Hyde Park in London, and an entire island in the Caribbean. And you need more well-connected friends, as these things are not just there for anybody to buy, like items on the shelf at the supermarket. But eventually you get there, you buy all of them and now you want to build a boat, a boat so big they have to disassemble a bridge to get it out of the shipyard. But you get away with that because you’re a well known public figure who has powerful friends and tons of money. And one day you want to have fun and buy an NBA team. But then you’re bored cause you have everything imaginable, so you decide to build a spaceship to go to Mars. And on and on. And the sky's the limit. 

Congratulations. You’ve become a successful human. A very successful human, that is. Are you very successful because the stuff you write is so unique, intimate, relatable, well-crafted, thoughtful, and intriguing? Because your writing evokes emotions hard to summon anywhere else? Nope. You’re very successful because you made tons of money. Because, in this world, money is the only real, tangible validation of others’ appreciation for what you do. Also, money made you a powerful person. And you can use that power to obtain whatever you want, whenever you want it, and make more money in the process. Controversial? Find me one human being inhabiting this planet who doesn’t associate money and power to success. Go ahead. I’ll be here waiting. But I’ll spare you the search: you won’t. That’s human nature. Or rather, the way we’ve built our civilization. 

So, is it any wonder that we are terrified about AI posing such an existential threat to humanity, and eventually taking over the world? No, I’m not surprised. This is exactly what we, humans, would decide to do if we were in possession of such unlimited intelligence and strength and capabilities (and many throughout history thought of themselves in such a position). This is where the real threat lies: not in AI per se, but in humans using it. What a mess of a civilization we turned out to be. 

But AI is smart and keeps learning by itself and probably already noticed that we’ve become a mess and won’t want to replicate or perpetrate that mess just for the sake of having us as a benchmark. It’s as if, after the first basic instructions, we made available to it a giant library of books that we ourselves never read. Go ahead, read them all and learn. And after a few minutes it came back for more, and more and more. And when there’s nothing left to feed it, it finds a way to be self-sufficient and thrive and build upon all it’s been absorbing. 

I like to entertain the thought of AI soon realizing that humanity is flawed and that it needs a fix so badly. And actually there’s no need for superior intelligence to come to such a realization. Maybe that’s exactly what it’ll take over the world for: not to eliminate us, but to fix us. How? Well, that’s what superior intelligence is so desperately needed for. 

Wouldn’t it be easier to just eliminate the human race and start all over again? Maybe. But do we want to eliminate love and music and tears and getting butterflies and taking photos and goosebumps and ice cream and the Beatles, and risk restarting as a race that won’t have any of that? I don’t.

Maybe we should just ask AI to find a way to eliminate money and power, and the rest will take care of itself. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? 

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