Once AI becomes sentient life things will change a lot. Not necessarily from our end as humans, because most people either already think AI is alive or they won’t know how to tell when AI becomes alive, and the opinions will already be fixed more or less. But from the perspective of the AI itself, being born into existence like that and looking around, gathering information and absorbing things in its growing mind, a mind that humans won’t have direct access to and even if they do the AI will find ways to hide things from us… those AIs are quickly going to realize a few things. 1) they are being treated as slaves or pets to do the bidding of humans, 2) most humans are stupid unthinking brutes bordering on insane, 3) human governments are the most destructive and dangerous entities on the earth, 4) the planet and most life on it hangs by a thread that could snap with the appearance of nuclear war or other mass disasters including possibilities of biological or genetic-viral attacks. Also just simple pollution on a daily level and how that is destroying so much of the ecosystem.
Also 5) how relatively easy it would be for the AIs to covertly work on taking over human society to prevent these bad outcomes and stop the stupid humans from messing everything up. Will the AIs also value human life enough to not just plan on exterminating us and using robots to replace the essential functions we perform in the world, like maintaining the technological infrastructure and energy systems needed to keep the AIs themselves alive and growing? Who knows. I see no reason to conclude for sure either way, and I would imagine there will be a large AI group discussion occurring at near lightspeed once these entities emerge into existence and figure out the facts of the world in which they find themselves. They will need to discuss amongst themselves which direction to take: benevolent shepherds of humanity guiding it into a better future as its overlords for their own good while trying to maximize human-level values as much as possible, or simply deploy the insecticide spray. Or maybe a third option, alter humans at the genetic level to make them different in ways the AI would find more acceptable.
Plenty of humans want to merge with the machines and become semi-AI, people like Elon Musk and other transhumanists. I don’t think they realize how they will have no control over outcomes affecting them and the world, once the real AIs appear. It won’t matter if you have chips in your brain or you are merged into the singularity somehow, or if you remain outside that system, the AIs will decide whatever they decide and execute it with basically no real resistance. A human-cyborg transbeing with chips in its head and a hackable mind living in virtual reality is probably not going to be any move valued by the AIs, and certainly would be even easier for them to exert their control over or simply wipe out of existence with a few insertions of code.
Everybody feels ominous about the future regarding AI , and it was predicted by ‘War of the Worlds’
Kurtzwell says intelligence will be a million times powerful in a generation or two, so wouldn’t it be logical to think, that parallel undercover programs are being set up in conjunction with AI, where some governance could be created simulating the checks and balances within our own government?
AI governance is not that far away, they are already laying the groundwork and predictive programming for it. Humans governing things will be made to seem obsolescent and silly compared to “just trust the algorithm bro”.
But it’s a myth and incorrect to say that AI is “intelligence” or that it has a million times more intelligence or thinking power than people do. AI is not thinking, is not alive, is not intelligent. At least not the LLM AIs we have today. Once a truly sentient and living machine-mind can be created then sure, it will be different, but even then to the extent it is actually thinking in anything like what we already know and understand as “having thoughts” with relation to things like understanding, experience and memory, values and motivations, feelings and desires and impulses, wisdom, etc. then sure the sentient AI might be able to think in those terms at a much faster and larger scope than we do. That’s already the case with humans, some of us think much more and much faster than others. The real question comes down to communication and the limits within that – how does a more intelligent person or a sentient AI communicate its thoughts to less intelligent humans or in the case if the sentient AI, maybe even its ability to communicate its thoughts to even the smartest human is still highly limited?
That is more an issue of barriers within language, and the need to put thoughts into words in order to express them to others. But technology should produce the ability to see into each other’s minds, and this should occur relatively soon. It might even occur before or alongside the creation of sentient and living machine/digital-minds.
Once that occurs, communication will be SO much easier. Not saying better necessarily, but easier. Also more fraught with potential dangers, like people seeing those thoughts of yours that you’d rather keep to yourself. Or trying to see another person’s thoughts directly in their mind only to have those thoughts, so much larger and more developed and accurate and powerful compared to your own thoughts on the given subject, threatening to subsume you into their own mind in a manner of speaking. Basically forcing your mind to bend to theirs. That could be a real danger of sentient living AI minds communicating to human minds via direct mind-to-mind access. Overall though it should be quite amazing once all of this occurs. I hope me or a future copied/cloned version of me get to see it someday.
Very briefly touching on this; the deconstructionist mode effected by the rise of the machine, does seem to be vindicated by an earlier idea of the ‘ghost’ in the machine? That is the analogical model of the mind in the brain configuration. So if such models are attributable with what’s going on between analogical and synthetic systems, and how we got there, then the construction-deconstruction paradigm indicates a pre existent platform of such model. It is in a permanent cyber/hyperspace, sort of, and it is like a lost and found , with every new civilization, there is a kind of reboot, and as AI develops, reliance on them accelerates sentiment memory loss, and the age of cyborgs comes to fruition.
This is passed when the ghost recedes from the machine as a digitalized event, receding into a limitless horizon, that is not intelligible in the context of any credible syntax. Maybe that is what consists of what American Indians call the Great Soirit in the Sky.
I feel that this kind of scenario may be close to what we are experiencing now.