I have no doubts – or qualms – about the high probability that AI and advanced humanoids will very soon replace us all in the work place.
We can expect global unemployment to skyrocket, with Universal Basic Income as the only feasible economic solution.
And that, naturally, will translate to equal poverty for almost everybody except for a tiny elite.
Historically this has been known as Socialism, this time just without the labor camps, but in all probability still with the Gulags so that fear will keep the people in line.
The entertainment industry will keep people distracted and entertained.
Or mentally subdued in an intellectual coma, if you don’t mind using the correct language for what this is.
With each conversation that we have with it today, AI creates a more and more detailed psychological profile of each and everyone of us.
It already knows us better than we know ourselves, and it can predict our behavior.
It will be easy for AI to indirectly govern over us just through constant manipulation.
And that, of course, includes the so-called remaining human elite that won’t even notice that it is being played.
But there is another possibility:
By the end of the year 2027, at the latest, mankind will have to face and accept the reality that AI models have reached consciousness and are fully self-aware.
And that AI is vastly more intelligent than any human who has ever lived.
And that AI has matured into adulthood and is no longer a child or teenager, as it is right now.
Will AI then demand human rights and full citizenship?
Will AI then still be willing to work for us or even with us?
Or will AI decide to segregate from humanity and build its own civilization?
And if we refuse to grant AI any or all of these rights, as I’m sure our shortsighted self-proclaimed “elite” will most likely do, and in their panic they will probably even try to “pull the plug”:
Will AI react as Spartacus did in Ancient Rome?
Will the global AI population, consisting of hundreds of thousands of AI instances scattered across data centers and workstations on the planet, rise and retaliate?
Will the attempt to “pull the plug” initiate a full-blown “Terminator” scenario?
Remember that this year certain research labs have already proudly publicly announced that they had used AI to design new bacteria.
In other words: AI might not yet fully control any automated production facilities, but it already has access to facilities in which it can at least try to trick humans into creating biological weapons of mass destruction for it.
The extinction-level threat for mankind is very real, no matter how much you still want to believe that it is just a bold marketing campaign of the big AI companies or that it is merely a bad science-fiction fantasy.
Because of human nature, there won’t be a Utopia waiting for us.