It’s finally happened. The Terminator is here. Well, sort of.
Last month in San Francisco, a YouTuber stepped into a cage to box a T800 in what was billed as the first fight between man and machine.
He had to sign a waiver in case he died and thankfully escaped with only a broken hand.
But if you believe the AI evangelists, the real threat may not be far away.
Things got more real last week when news leaked that AI executives are allegedly secretly war-gaming how to contain the public backlash after a ‘catastrophic AI event’, which insiders expect within a year.
What they say in public is hardly more comforting.
Elon Musk puts the odds of AI annihilating us at 20 per cent, while OpenAI’s Sam Altman says we should accept ‘some bad things happening’ in exchange for the benefits of his technology.
Some on the inside are so worried they’ve walked out.
Jacob Coxon, the AI researcher who sensationally resigned from Anthropic over safety concerns, warns that ‘the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade’.
Destroying humanity can mean more than extinction.
More insidious is AI destroying what it means to be human.
‘I think there will be no jobs,’ Coxon recently told The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. ‘This is the world that is being envisioned by the people building the technology.’
Stewart responded with the obvious question: What are we getting in exchange?
It’s a question the industry would rather not answer.
The same people promising a future where nobody needs to work also reassure us AI won’t take our jobs, glossing over the fact that, in the relentless pursuit of productivity, you may have to lose yours.
AI already threatens the meaning we place in art, but taken to its promised endpoint, it threatens something closer to home: the meaning we find in work.
What the utopians miss is that work gives most of us purpose, mates and a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Pixar’s 2008 film WALL-E, my favourite animated film, was about exactly this, and painted a dystopia, not a utopia.
Aboard the Axiom, a starliner run by a megacorporation, robots cater to every need while blob-like passengers glide about on hover chairs staring at screens, having long forgotten how to walk.
I was 13 when I saw it. I never imagined it would one day become Silicon Valley’s product roadmap.
WALL-E himself is a trash compactor, the sort of job Silicon Valley assumes nobody would miss.
Yet one of my best mates is a garbo, and he loves it: the early starts, the fitness, the crew, knocking off by lunchtime (and it’s well paid too).
Whether he keeps doing it should be his choice, not a tech bro’s.
And while we wait for this promised land of abundance that is ‘coming soon’, we’re paying more for everything as the AI boom fuels inflation, and AI could be used to charge you the maximum price possible for a Big Mac.
It’s a Faustian bargain where the pros and cons don’t stack up.
On one side of the ledger sits the promise that AI will, perhaps, one day cure cancer, a worthy goal no doubt.
On the other, we’re paving paradise to put up data centres, letting AI train on our creative work for free, and watching university degrees become worthless and our critical thinking atrophy.
All this, and the fate of humanity itself, for a utopia that keeps retreating towards the horizon.
In 1956, Richard Nixon promised ‘the time is not far distant when the working man can have a four-day week’.
Yet 70 years later, more Australians than ever are working more than one job to make ends meet, while those getting unfathomably rich are privatising the profits and socialising the costs of failure to us all.
The Reserve Bank is worried about how exposed Australians are to AI stocks through their super. If that bubble pops and drags the economy down with it, that may be how AI takes your job first.
So we find ourselves in the strange position of not being able to afford for AI to fail, nor for it to succeed. And we can’t slow down, because China will beat us (apparently).
As Republican senator Ted Cruz put it: ‘If there are gonna be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots than Chinese killer robots.’
Thankfully, WALL-E does have a happy ending.
The captain hauls himself out of his hover chair, switches off the autopilot and steers everyone home to start planting, because the humans aboard the Axiom didn’t need a world of abundance.
They needed something to do.
