Even the AI Doomers get it wrong. I hear so often of the potential panacea that a true AI might bring. Cure diseases. Everyone will be rich. No war or strife. All done by magical AI faeries.
Bollocks.
What both sides fail to understand is the physical limits of reality. No, 9 Billion people cannot all have yachts, their own disneyland, slaves, etc… No disease, no death. Really? There just isn’t enough stuff. No AI can fix that.
For sake of argument, let’s say AI could solve most of our problems. Say for everyone to have enough (or more accurately what we really want, much much more than enough) what might the answer be? The AI tells us that ‘stop having children’ would be the obvious answer. If there is only a limited amount of stuff, then for everyone to have enough stuff, less ‘everyone’ is the obvious answer. Another example might be to prevent wars and easily commited violent crimes, the AI tells us to simply take away and destroy our weapons. To beat our swords into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4). You might imagine how that might be received in some hypothetical militaristic country… But I need to shoot bunnies… Do you?
I am confident if mankind is presented with logical and workable solutions, that we will just say, “No, I am not doing that”. In fact we don’t even need AI to come up with workable solutions to most of our problems. We already know the solutions to most of our problems. This is the problem of ‘The Commons. We simply are self centered creatures and will not do what is in the best interests for the long term and for all.
The bottom line is that no matter how smart someone, or something is, they will not be able to solve all problems. Life (ie: biology) is build on, and from problems. You kill all the viruses and bacteria, even the bad ones, and nothing good will come from it in the long term I can assure you. To make matters worse, the problems that can be solved (even ones we know how to solve today) will be ignored by you and I. It is said there is more that enough food to feed everyone. And yet, I bet if someone says that you and I can’t have our T-Bone because we have to feed starving Africans, we will grab our pitchforks and torches and poot those African babies down ourselves. We are a greedy greedy species. God’s chosen indeed. In our defense, all creatures are inherently and biologically inclined to greed. The difference is we have climbed over the apex predator fence in to the unstoppable predator. Biology teaches us that when a biological force is unstoppable it will eventually kill itself by stripping all the recourses it requires.