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There’s more I want to write about AI and humanity, but I have to find the time and words. If you’re not already aware from Hacker News, you may be interested in Vatican’s Magnifica Humanitas.
I empathize: I don't like how culture has changed, for example I prefer the 2000s-10s Internet and style.
But everything decays from entropy, and we become desensitized. Without some radical innovation, future generations will be devastated by climate change. More generally and hypothetically: animals grow old, their genes decay, and the only way to prevent extinction is (re)birth; I believe other egregores like companies and societies are similar: they must adopt lessons from the past, plus some experiments, or they’ll degrade.
Millions of years ago we were monkeys. But even decades ago, humanity was much different. Would you really like to go back to a world without, not just internet, but its related advancements (mostly due to increased access to knowledge) like improved medical care and food storage? Maybe…but what about world before the Industrial Revolution, when most people were serfs who had to constantly work and a non-negligible change of starving or freezing? Today's world has serious problems like life-altering disease, it may be like pre-Industrial Revolution to the future.
I can’t prove AI won’t turn the world into a dystopia like 1984 or The Culture. But I’m skeptical: people thought similarly about GOFAI, wide-reaching broad problems tend to be more complex than they seem on the surface. Notice, 3 years after ChatGPT was announced, the best models are still hijackable (sometimes easily) and occasionally stupid.
Again, more generally and hypothetically: I believe that any large enough system can’t dominate without desire, failure, and introspection, and thus, a “life experience” not incomparable to ours today. It will just be, if an oligarchy or AI takes control, experienced by the former oligarchs or AI nodes. Because without desire, a being cannot act; without omnipotence, desires can be unfulfilled (or fulfilled); and without introspection, a being cannot avoid mispredicting reality (and failing to one that doesn't).
I strongly disagree and am interested to hear why you feel this, but maybe it’s because I'm thinking on different premises.
How do we know we’re not already living in such a simulation? We can't, definitionally: if we were in a perfect (from our perception) simulation, reality would be no different. So if you don’t think our reality is the Bad Ending, you don't think at least one possible instantiation of the simulation is the Bad Ending...or I don't understand.
You may argue, we're already experiencing seriousness, true pain, and terror. But what level defines these? Maybe we are being shielded from Lovecraftian horrors that make the worst human crises and experiences trivial. Alternatively, you can probably imagine some changes that would improve your life and weaken your problems…would those be bad; or where's the limit where life would become too trivial, and why not stop right before then?
Again, I can't disprove this, but besides my argument any dominant force would have an abstract "life experience" within itself...
Current evidence (one theory) predicts the universe will eventually go through heat death, meaning any empire will collapse into infinite nothingness...something that seems like a Bad Ending. However, current evidence suggests current evidence can't predict (and certainly can't prove) extreme states, like how Classical Physics was disproved and replaced with Special Relativity. Heat death, like the "perfect life" simulation, is unobservable by definition…I feel at that point, the universe isn’t “real”, and could become any hypothetical or something outside the realm of possibility; although I can’t objectively justify this, because I don’t think anyone can objectively state anything about the present universe immediately after heat death…
I think today's AI harms humanity by harming individualism, since most AI output is similar (has the same underlying patterns, compared to human output). But this is a problem with the AI itself, because it stagnates (model collapse) similarly to humanity, unless it evolves partly via experimentation.
I also think today's AI isn't having a "life experience", but that's because it isn't human-like: it doesn't (continuously) learn, and its desires are too malleable. A smarter AI, that can't be easily persuaded or fooled, may qualify as "conscious", although my position is that consciousness is ultimately subjective. But then, a smarter AI will have its own interesting conflicts that fit some definition of life, even if it's a paperclip maximizer. And if it does dominate humanity, it will almost certainly eventually be dominated itself; either by creating an even smarter misaligned intelligence, or by an environmental phenomenon like climate change or heat death.
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