Q: Can artificial intelligence run the world.
A: No.
I’ve looked at this many different ways, and today I am thinking of the classic film Metropolis . It is, to make it overly simple, the story of a beautiful city of the future run by advanced machines. In the upper classes of society there is utopia and the designer of the city is rightfully proud. In the lower classes of society there is drudgery in service to the machines that keep the city running. One day the machine breaks, killing workers, and the resulting chaos destroys the dream of Metropolis.
The second film I am thinking of is part of The Animatrix and it is an origin story of what we currently believe to be our deus ex machina, AI. This story, The Second Renaissance, tells of a future in which humankind refuses to accept machines as equals, banishing them to the Sahara Desert where they ultimately flourish, making better manufactured parts than any humans. Ultimately humans and the machines battle for world supremacy and to destroy the source of the machines’ power, the Sun, human destroy the sky. Thus is born the world we begin to watch as The Matrix.
I can’t tell you much science fiction literature and film has dealt with such questions. They are enormously complex. Nevertheless it really boils down to this. What is more important to you as a human being? Is it that which you can give and receive from other human beings, or that which you can give and receive from machines? The answer, for all of history has been that humans are much more important than machines - and that machines only exist to serve the needs of mankind.
I believe this is consistent even today. The consequence of that means underneath the question of machines running the world is a profound lack of trust in those who are running the world now. Logically then, one must ask the question, who is going to teach machines how to run the world better than humans? In otherwords, which humans will get the trillions of dollars necessary to design, build, and educate machines? Why would they do that for machines and not for humans? You see the paradox.
I say that AIs will not emerge with any intelligence that humans can trust for such matters as security guard duty within the next 40 years. I predict at that point in the future we will be lamenting all of the money wasted on self-driving cars when we could have just built self-driving subways for a lot less money, and having saved many more lives.
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