I’ve honestly come to believe that how we choose to handle the global race towards superintelligence in the next few years will have major implications for everything else we talk about. Politics. Culture. Our jobs. Our kids’ education. Our relationships. This is a technology that will probably affect every aspect of our lives – and that potentially includes whether we still get to live them.
I am not a doomer. I don’t like being alarmist. I don’t think it’s the most effective way to persuade people, and I don’t find it to be a healthy headspace for me personally.
To be completely honest, I also wasn’t that interested in AI until a few years ago. It was never really clear to me how the technology worked, what it could do, why we needed it, and why people were starting to freak out about it. I had also become quite skeptical of the tech lords whose last gift to mankind turned out to be a series of algorithms that have made us all crazy. Not a great track record from Silicon Valley’s geniuses and the ones who think they’re geniuses because they’re rich – people who are now having a tough time selling the world on the promise of their latest technology when we can barely look away from our screens for more than ten minutes.
But here we are. Well over a billion people worldwide are now using AI chatbots. Global spending on AI is expected to reach $2.7 trillion this year – almost as much every country on Earth combined spent on its military last year. The seven tech giants now make up about a third of the S&Ps total value. And several have been warning us for some time that the products they’re building might kill us:
They are not alone in their thinking…
