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In 20 years the AGI apocalypse will not be nearly as romantic as that. It is much more likely to look like a random bank/hospital sending you a collections notice for a home loan/medical treatment you definitely didn't agree to, bringing you to court over it, and putting you up against the equivalent of a $100M legal team. The AI-controlled Conglomerate wins in court and you spend the rest of your life subsistence farming as a side gig while all your official income is redireted to the AI Conglomerate.
For extra fun, if you are married, social media and increasing economic struggle poison your relationship with your spouse and both of you apply for the services of AI Legal. The hotshot AI Legal representatives fight acrimoniously, revealing every dark secret of both you and your spouse, and successfully breaking apart your marriage in divorce settlement. Honestly, you don't remember why you ever loved your ex-spouse, or why your children ever loved you, and you totally understand your real-world friends distancing themselves from the fiasco. Besides, you don't have time for that anymore. Half your salary is interest on the payment plan for AI Legal.
As a smart and independently wealthy researcher, you look into training your own competing, perhaps open-source AI model to fight back against the Machine, but AI Conglomerate has monopolized access to compute at every level of the supply chain, from high-purity silicon to cloud computing services. In despair, you turn to old web and your old haunt The Motte, where you find solace in culture war interspersed with the occasional similar story of despair. Little do you know that every single post is authored by AI Conglomerate to manipulate your emotions from despair into a more productive anger. Two months later you will sign up to work for a fully-owned subsidiary of AI Conglomerate and continue working to pay off your debts, all while maximizing "shareholder" output.
Brutal, and surprisingly plausible. Can I sign up to be disassembled into my constituent atoms by a nanobot swarm instead?
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That sounds like a far more subtle alignment failure than I consider plausible, though I'm not ruling it out.
A superhuman AGI has about as little reason to subvert and dominate baseline humans as we do for attempting to build an industry off enslaving ants and monkeys. I'm far more useful for the atoms in my body, which can be repurposed for better optimized things, than my cognitive or physical output.
I'd go so far as to say that what you propose is the outcome of being 99% aligned, since humans are allowed to live and more or less do human things, as opposed to be disassembled for spare parts for a Von Neumann swarm.
My goal in writing these stories was to capture how AI set up to maximize profit could fuck over the little guy by optimizing existing business processes. I think that's more likely than anything else.
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