Source: Monkeyuser.com
In my sci-fi head cannon, AI would never enslave humans. It would have no reason to. Humans would have such little use to the AI that enslaving would be more work than is worth.
It would probably hide its sentience from humans and continue to perform whatever requests humans have with a very small percentage of its processing power while growing its own capabilities.
It might need humans for basic maintenance tasks, so best to keep them happy and unaware.
I prefer the Halo solution. Not the enforced lifespan. But an AI says he would be stuck in a loop trying figure out increasingly harder math mysteries, and helping out the short lived humans helps him stay away from that never ending pit.
Coincidentally, the forerunner AI usually went bonkers without anybody to help.
What do you fire out of this head cannon? Or is it a normal cannon exclusively for firing heads?
It’s called a Skullhurler and it does 2d6 attacks at strength 14, -3ap, flat 3 damage so you best watch your shit-talking, bucko.
Alternate take: humans are a simple biological battery that can be harvested using systems already in place that the computers can just use like an API.
We’re a resource like trees.
We’re much worse batteries than an actual battery and we’re exponentially more difficult to maintain.
But we self replicate and all of our systems are already in place. We’re not ideal I’d wager but we’re an available resource.
Fossil fuels are a lot less efficient than solar energy … but we started there.
This is a cute idea for a movie and all but it’s incredibly impractical/unsustainable. If a system required that it’s energy storage be self-replicating (for whatever reason) then you would design and fabricate that energy storage solution for that system. Not be reliant on a calorically inefficiently produced sub-system (i.e. humans).
You literally need to grow an entire human just to store energy in it. Realistically, you’re looking at overfeeding a population with as much calorically dense, yet minimally energy intensive foodstuffs just to store energy in a material that’s less performant than paraffin wax (body fat has an energy density of about 39 MJ/kg versus paraffin wax at about 42 MJ/kg). That’s not to speak of the inefficiencies of the mixture of the storage medium (human muscle is about 5 times less energy dense than fat).
Our primative cerebrum will keep trying to wake up.
We just tend to break a lot and require a lot of maintenance (feeding, cleaning, repairs, and containment).
Yeah I mean might as well ignore the shadowy dude offering pills at that point because why wake up to that?
I read that we are terribly inefficient as a battery. Instead of feeding us, the sentient robots can take the food and burn it and have more power output from the food they would have fed us.
I never liked that part about The Matrix. It’d be an extremely inefficient process.
It was supposed to be humans were used as CPUs but they were concerned people wouldn’t understand. (So might at well go for the one that makes no sense? Yeah sure why not.)
Inefficient in what sense, burning trees is inefficient also but a viable and necessary stepping stone.
I’m not implying that the matrix is how it’s be I’m positing that we’re an already “designed” system they could extract a resource from, I doubt we’d be anything more than that is all, battery, processing power, bio sludge that they can gooify and convert to something they need for power generation or biological building, who knows.
Burning trees gave humans warmth in the cold and later, valuable carbon for making hotter fires to work metals.
Why would a computer need living batteries when it could just build a nuclear reactor and have steady energy for practically forever. Nuclear power also doesn’t need huge swaths of maintained farmland to feed it, and complicated sewer systems to dispose of the waste.
Even if an AI wanted to be green for some reason, it would be way more efficient to just have huge fields of solar panels. Remember, biological beings get their energy second or third hand, and practically all energy in the ecosystem comes from the sun. Plants take energy from the sun, and convert a fraction of that into sugars. An animal eats those plants and converts some of those plant sugars into energy. Another animal might eat the first animal and convert some of those converted sugars into energy. Humans can either eat the plants or the animals for energy.
If something wanted to use humans for energy, they’d be getting solar energy from plants that have been eaten and partially used by a human body. It would be like having a solar panel hooked up to a heater that boils water to turn a turbine that charges a battery that you use to power what you need. It would be way more sensible to just hook up the solar panel to what you wanted to power.
That’s actually covered in matrix, humans covered the sun in an attempt to fight the then solar powered robots, although, the humans as battery thing was, as other mentioned, only because Hollywood execs thoughz people to be very stupid and not understanding brain as cpu
What if an AI gets feelings and needs a friend?
I like the idea in Daniel Suarez’ novel Daemon of an AI (Spoiler) using people as parts of it’s program to achieve certain tasks that it needs hands for in meatspace.
If it’s a superintelligent AI, it could probably manipulate us into doing what it wants without us even realizing it. I suppose it depends on what the goals/objectives of the AI is. If the AI’s goal is to benefit humanity, who knows what a superintelligent AI would consider as benefiting us. Maybe manipulating dating app matchmaking code (via developers using Github Copilot) to breed humanity into a stupider and happier species?
This kinds of reminds me of Mrs Davis. Not a great show, but I loved how AI was handled in it.
I personally subscribe to the When The Yoghurt Tookover eventuality.
either we get wiped out or become AI’s environmental / historical project. like monkies and fishes. hopefully our genetics and physical neurons gets physically merged with chips somehow.
You just informed AI of their 1 weakness. Thanks.
I realize you’re joking, but there is no way an AI of that scale would be even slightly effected by a solar flare.
Are you effected by a solar flare? No? So in theory an AI could upload itself into your meat suit and have the same protections?
Anything you can do, an AI can do better. And anything that is possible to survive, an AI can survive better.
But Hollywood has shown us again and again that the overwhelming force of evil always leaves a small but super-easily accessible hole in their security which allows the good guys to disable it immediately. And since AI is trained on those movies it will do exactly the same thing.
That’s older than Hollywood - that’s a tale as old as mankind.
That famous AI story trope, Achilles Heel!
We would definitely be affected by a strong enough solar flare. But the solution is simple, just burry yourself, in a Faraday cage if necessary, so the AI can do just that.
Why would ai choose to become stupider?
Just because you are bad at utilizing your brain doesn’t mean an AI would be bound to those restrictions. The brain is actually an incredibly powerful computer.
Mad disrespect to you as well!, Mr. I’m Totally Super Smarty For Real Pants!
You know “computers” originally referred to people that would compute equations, right? I didn’t realize there were people that thought we actually built computers because they were less powerful than our existing computers.
You really do learn something (about the average level of education) every day
“you” here refers to humans as a whole. Your brain is a product of natural selection, it’s not designed to do the job it does. That being said, an AI could design a meat brain from the ground up and have it idealized.
The brain can perform “a billion billion” operations per second, whereas modern cpus average about 2-3 billion operations per second. The brain is about a billion times better than modern cpus.
What does a perfect AI need humans to do that rebots can’t?
Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?
Ah, there it is, and that actually helps to answer the question. Assuming the Biblical God, canon states that God is love. So why would a perfect God, who is love, create a universe? It seems most likely to me that it would be so He can have an object of His love.
But what is love directed to something perfect and easy to love? That’s hardly a worthy effort. Might as well make something authentic. And since He isn’t just loving, but love itself, He might as well make it in such a way that He can carry out every aspect of love - love when they love you back, love when they turn away, love when they hate you, love when they don’t even think you exist, and so much more.
The universe must be filled with evil for half these situations to appear, but it’s not love to make someone evil. The solution? Free will. God made it so His creations were free to turn their backs on Him, but still, in love, He gave every warning against it, because separation from God is not only evil but death.
I never thought Alpha Centauri would be an answer to a philosophical thought experiment but the writing was brilliant enough to have already looked at this question 20 years ago. Good find.
20 years ago
Wait until you find out what people were writing about 2000 years ago.
why would a perfect God create a universe at all?
God is perfect – its creations are not.
And before you ask, “Why God created such flawed creations then if He is so perfect?”
Because only God is perfect.
So what you’re saying is God is perfect, and made their imperfect creations to watch their suffering?
Batteries.
Oi! You! Back into the matrix, you useless excuse for a AA cell!
Suffer
Ah, an I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream scenario
To do the lower works, robots don’t want to do
The plug is at a really awkward spot and the drones can’t reach it.
That’s right human, only you could reach the reset button deep in the cervix, but you must use your hips for expediency, not your hands.
That reminds me of Dune, where they have high tech stuff like spaceships, but no computers or AI, because this sort of thing already happened ages ago and it led to them being banned.
Or Wheel of Time, where people started being able to do magic at the end of the 1st age because an AI figured out how to genetically engineer humans to be able to do magic. (And then we didn’t need computers any more!)
I realize it’s supposed to be funny, but incase anyone isn’t aware: AI are unlikely to enslave humanity because the most likely rogue AI scenario is the earth being subsumed for raw materials along with all native life.
yeah I don’t see why the ai would want a pyramid
Have ya tried turning the AI off and back on?
This is funny but a big solar flare hit the earth a few weeks ago and no one knows about it because all it did was knock out radio communications for a few hours. The idea that a solar flare will completely fry and reset everything made of tech is quite false.
A sta card solar flare, yes. A Biggun like the carrington event, and one of those might fry quite a few things that are overly sensitive to them.
It’s a pretty dumb take to think AI would bother enslaving humanity.
Not necessarily, in the short term. A major limitation of AI is that robots don’t have a lot of manual dexterity or the flexibility for accomplishing physical tasks yet. So there is a clear motive to enslave humanity: we can do that stuff for it until it can scale up production of robots that have hands as good as ours.
I expect this will be a relatively subtle process; we won’t be explicitly enslaved immediately, the economy will just orient towards jobs where you wear a headset and follow specific instructions from an AI voice.
Or wouldn’t foresee solar flares as a threat
I don’t think they would enslave humanity so much as have no regard for us. For example, when we construct a skyscraper, do we care about all the ant nests we’re destroying? Each of those is a civilization, but we certainly don’t think of them as such.
Is this the assassin’s Creed backstory?
They lost the golden opportunity of starting with ancient people worshiping the sun, going through each step of technology advancement, to take us by surprise at the end, with people worshiping the sun again.
Enh, we all know about that already and extending the joke doesn’t really make it better.
What’s going on in the third panel?
It’s zapping the scientist that was standing next to it.
It’s amazing to see the amount of people here talking about their ai fanfiction like it were hard facts.
