Page 113 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

“It’s a no-brainer.”

“I get the sense of the meeting,” said Izzy Azimuth, “that all of
us are beginning to wear out each other’s welcome. Does that
usually happen after a couple of rounds?”
Nods and assenting grunts confirmed his supposition.
“Then I shall not expatiate excessively. Apart from winners and
losers in the variety of impending apocalypses, the looming specter
of artificial intelligence is as gripping as any other topic. And it is
gripping in the same literal way, as well: once an all-powerful man-
made horror is unleashed, we will have no way out of paying for
our foolishness, pride, ignorance or whatever mortal sin one cares
to blame for our downfall and destruction. The advent of smarter
brains than ours has that capability, that finality of doom, the ‘uh-
oh’ moment. No going back, at least in part because we have
become dependent on cybernetic devices over the past three
generations, their convenience and capabilities easily worming their
way into our lives to the point of becoming necessities. We
effectively are all cyborgs now, unable to function without our
electromechanical enhancements. This much is a given; my story
will take it for granted—the fact and the fear.”
“But, of course, rebellion against tyranny is in our nature; thus
the all-too common scenario of guerilla warfare against robots and
the surveillance state. So, let us imagine a near-future in which
people have become so accustomed to dealing with the purveyors
of commodities, entertainment and information remotely, via
virtual reality, that we have unwittingly crossed the ‘uncanny valley’
of weird and disturbing confrontations with artifice, and don’t easily
or immediately know or care with whom or what we are dealing
during a normal day’s activities. Today’s chatbots and expert
systems will seem crude, if not laughable to people in that future,
just as coin-operated dial telephones appear to us today. Most of
the population, as always, doesn’t mind the new reality and loss of
autonomy—if it is even aware of it.”

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