AI takeover
Possible scenarios include replacement of the entire human workforce due to automation, takeover by an artificial superintelligence (ASI), and the notion of a robot uprising.
Some public figures, such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, have advocated research into precautionary measures to ensure future superintelligent machines remain under human control.
However, recent innovation in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence has raised worries that human labor will become obsolete, leaving people in various sectors without jobs to earn a living, leading to an economic crisis.
A study in 2024 highlights AI's ability to perform routine and repetitive tasks poses significant risks of job displacement, especially in sectors like manufacturing and administrative support.
[7] Author Dave Bond argues that as AI technologies continue to develop and expand, the relationship between humans and robots will change; they will become closely integrated in several aspects of life.
Care work, entertainment, and other tasks requiring empathy, previously thought safe from automation, have also begun to be performed by robots.
Among the obstacles to widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles are concerns about the resulting loss of driving-related jobs in the road transport industry.
In most cases, AI-generated content such as imagery, literature, and music are produced through text prompts and these AI models have been integrated into other creative programs.
This complication has become widespread enough to where other artists and programmers are creating software and utility programs to retaliate against these text-to-image models from giving accurate outputs.
There is an ongoing lawsuit placed against OpenAI from The New York Times where it is claimed that there is copyright infringement due to the sampling methods their artificial intelligence models use for their outputs.
[23] The idea is seen in Karel Čapek's R.U.R., which introduced the word robot in 1921,[24] and can be glimpsed in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (published in 1818), as Victor ponders whether, if he grants his monster's request and makes him a wife, they would reproduce and their kind would destroy humanity.
He argues that the most damaging humans in history were not physically the strongest, but that they used words instead to convince people and gain control of large parts of the world.
While both require large advances in recursive optimisation process design, friendly AI also requires the ability to make goal structures invariant under self-improvement (or the AI could transform itself into something unfriendly) and a goal structure that aligns with human values and does not undergo instrumental convergence in ways that may automatically destroy the entire human race.
But the question remains: what would happen if AI systems could interact and evolve (evolution in this context means self-modification or selection and reproduction) and need to compete over resources—would that create goals of self-preservation?
[36] Many scholars dispute the likelihood of unanticipated cybernetic revolt as depicted in science fiction such as The Matrix, arguing that it is more likely that any artificial intelligence powerful enough to threaten humanity would probably be programmed not to attack it.
Omohundro suggests that present-day automation systems are not designed for safety and that AIs may blindly optimize narrow utility functions (say, playing chess at all costs), leading them to seek self-preservation and elimination of obstacles, including humans who might turn them off.
In January 2015, Nick Bostrom joined Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, Elon Musk, Lord Martin Rees, Jaan Tallinn, and numerous AI researchers in signing the Future of Life Institute's open letter speaking to the potential risks and benefits associated with artificial intelligence.
