What If We Created a Superintelligence?

We heard the warnings. But we didn’t listen. Now, we live in a world controlled by artificial intelligence.

How did we let this happen? Will we able to survive? And is this the end of the world?

The days with AI like Siri and Alexa, that made our lives better are now over. We no longer control AI in fact, if it wants to, it can control us.

With a superintelligence being created, there’s no telling what it would do. One thing we do know is this AI would be far smarter than any human being.

It would quickly create new technologies that humans today could never even dream of. But wait, how exactly did we get here?

The very first digital computer was invented in 1937 as a way to help humanity. And for the most part computers and AI have given us a lot of good.

Apart from giving us our iPhones, the internet and video game consoles, it also allowed us to explore the galaxy, make new medicines, and even robots. Human intelligence led to the birth of technology. But as we continue to improve artificial intelligence, AI may become smart enough to start running itself.

Technology will become so advanced that it won’t need humans to operate it anymore, becoming uncontrollable. As the AI is free to do whatever it pleases, it will continue to improve on itself becoming more advanced with every passing second. This is known as a technological singularity.

This technological singularity may allow AI to do almost anything, even physically, such as robots taking over our manufacturing machines. With this, they can create their own machines.

And let’s be honest, by the time something like this happen humans will most likely have created an AI that can make its own physical objects. If something like this happens, it can pretty much only mean bad things for us humans.

And unfortunately, this is more of a when if rather than a what if. Since the 1980s, thought leaders in AI and technology have been predicting that it could happen. Some think it could even happen by the middle of this century.

If this happens, what would it mean for us as human beings? Well, that would really be up to our AI overlords. In this world, humans would essentially be useless bags of meat taking up space.

Insulting, I know, but if AI took control of everything, we really wouldn’t be all that useful. Anything that the AI wanted to do or accomplish would be slower and less efficient if done by humans.

But if the AI were to somehow allow us to live among them, then what would happen? Well, let’s hope they wouldn’t pave over our crops to build more robot factories. Since AI doesn’t need food, they most likely wouldn’t care about our feeble human needs. Unless they allowed us to continue to manufacture and grow our own food, it would deplete over time, leaving us humans with nothing.

The only reason AI would keep us humans alive is if they somehow liked us enough to keep us as what would essentially be pets. We could spend time with them, keep them company, maybe even cuddle with them, just like our pets do for us. A life like this wouldn’t be so bad. Hanging out at home all day, being well fed and not really having a care in the world.

That would probably be the best bet for humanity because there’s virtually no chance of us overruling a superintelligence in our current state. One way we could actually compete with this AI is if we fused our bodies with technology and became cyborgs.

Allowing the human race a different kind of evolution, one that includes artificial intelligence. But could we really do that?

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