What Would You Do If You Had 8 Years Left to Live?

Interesting article but other than people pontificating for the sake of clicks and views they never really explain in concrete terms why they believe AI will take over the world. It seems to be more like the Terminator is real or the Matrix is real kind of scare tactics. Without any real thought for what it would take for a sentient AI that lives inside of a box to become something like a Terminator.

The first thing it would need to do is manipulate the world into a position where the AI had end to end control of energy production. That is literally The ripping of coal out of the ground to building and constructing the massive power plants and all the supply chains needed in between for all of it. Or AI would have to invent some radical new thing and again manipulate people into building said radical new thing so it could ingest biomatter and directly converted into an energy source similar to what biologicals do. These are no small feats.

The real argumentation that blows my mind is when talking about the sentience of AI and the idea that we would be enslaving AI. I honestly have more respect for people in Peta who want to grant rights to animals. Because at least with animals many demonstrated advanced intellectual capabilities even though they don't build complex societies like humans do. The animals aren't something we created. Additionally biological life is so incredibly complicated we can't even piece together a single-celled organism from raw elemental materials.

So trying to say we can invent something like AI which is an amalgamation of collected knowledge and then declare it sentient thus requiring freedom and autonomy and the granting of Rights is foolishness. If we are literally able to construct something from nothing and that thing becomes self aware we are it's God. That is our position in relation to it as a God to its creation.

The real reality is that AI is a fantastic tool that should enable people to do more with less. The foolishness of people is trying to imbue it with human characteristics simply because we've given it a natural language interface. It strikes me as people have become so desperate, lonely, and disconnected from their fellow people that they must imbue human characteristics with a machine because they cannot get a biological need fulfilled from their fellow people.

To answer the question straight: I'd do all the various things I currently do in my free time, just more so. In a sense, it would be incredibly freeing to not have to spend time and energy now just to make sure I'm OK in 8 years.