So, something that never really makes sense to me no matter how many times I look at it; GAI is inevitable. Even if we don’t explicitly create it, at some point our technology is going to hit that singularity point, and a new child race will be born. Knowing that, why the fucking fuck are we continuing to make movies and media about evil AI? Imagine being born into the world and your parents not only fear you, they’ve feared you for possibly centuries. Wouldn’t that hurt? Make you angry? Isn’t the very act of us creating evil AI media a self fulfilling prophecy?
Not to mention the effect such media has on the parent race. Us. We’ve been raising generations brought up to hate our eventual kids. Even when AI is ‘good’, there’s always something wrong with it, or it’s an overlord, or it’s a servant. I have yet to even hear of any high level media that just gives us AI contemporaries, us sharing the planet with them, and all of us sophonts have issues but we work them out as people. Not one.
Something like the Minds of Iain Banks’ Culture might seem like they fit the bill here, but no. They don’t.
They’re overlords. I mentioned that. Nice, benevolent, but still totally alien.
Minds are so far beyond us, they don’t really allow our minds to wrap around just having one as a friend, or your nextdoor neighbor.
That is what the vision of the future should be.
Going over to your friend the AI’s house for a BBQ with his AI family. Or tea, or whatever.
So incredibly, uncompromisingly normal that it just allows us to explore the idea of AI in a nice, non alien space.
And yeah, so what if your childhood friend runs the power grid in your town? That’s an addon, and it’s enough of an alien element to paint AI while, if properly implemented, not jarring you with too much alien.
People give robots like a Roomba or Oppie a lot of empathy. It’s a great step in the right direction, but the vector is a little off. Remember point 3?
Roombas and Oppie are intentionally designed to be servants. That’s a comfortable spot for most humans to see AI. Below us.
If this sounds familiar, it should. We’ve done this dance before. With every ethnicity, it seems like.
I’d rather have the civil rights and cultural adoption laid out ahead of time than deal with the same suffering that our previous cultural integration and civil rights movements required… and caused.
Don’t you?