So the other day I wrote a post about how humanity is inevitably going to be disempowered by the existence of AI:
A bunch of people wrote to me and asked me: “What made you change your mind?”. Three years ago, shortly after the release of the original ChatGPT, I wrote a post about how LLMs are not going to destroy the human race:
And just a couple of months ago, I wrote a post arguing that ASI (artificial superintelligence) is likely to peacefully coexist with humanity rather than kill us off.
People wanted to know why my tone had shifted from optimistic to pessimistic.
Well, the simple answer to that is “I was in a worse mood.” My rabbit was sick, so I was kind of grumpy, and so in my post a few days ago I painted the eventual disempowerment of humanity as more of a negative thing than I usually do. In fact, I’ve always believed that at some point, humanity would be replaced with something posthuman — godlike AIs, a hive mind, modified humans, or whatever. I grew up reading science fiction about that kind of thing — Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Arthur C. Clarke, Iain M. Banks, and so on — and it just always seemed impossible that humanity had already attained the theoretical pinnacle of intelligence. I had always simply envisioned that whatever came after us would be in the general human family, and would be more likely to be on our side than against us.
That’s what my post the other day was about. I painted a more glum picture of humanity’s eventual supersession because I was in a bad mood. But even in that post, at the end, I offered optimism that ASI will save us from things like low fertility, fascist overlords, and the end of human-driven scientific discovery. That optimistic future would be like the Culture novels, by Iain M. Banks, in which AIs take the reins of civilization but in which they respect and help and protect a now-mostly-useless humanity — basically a much nicer, more enlightened version of the way the United States of America treats Native Americans nowadays. It’s a wistful f
