We seem to be hurtling towards that scenario at breakneck speed, and total abandon.
We may be the last generation of the current civilization to remember what it was like to not be hard wired into Big Brother’s matrix.
At least one liberal was honest when he founded “The Church of the Singularity”.
A lot of the liberal secularists invest the idea with religious devotion but deny it is a faith.
That there is no God, but we can and must develop an all-knowing, all seeing, all powerful AI we just know will be benevolent and ought to be obeyed. It’ll tell us how to live and create paradise on Earth. Don’t do what it says from resource management to population control, and we’ll get all the disasters the environmentalists appropriated from Revelations.
These liberals have also appropriated a lot of Christian beliefs. Many want to develop sentient AI because it means they could upload their brains to the Singularity - and get to be immortal in a digital afterlife.
I was at a conference this weekend. A panel on AI and machine learning had several people talking about how this was the future, was a necessity. One woman bashed Christianity as holding us back, how Asian cultures were so open to it because they didn’t think that developing superior AI was bad.
I raised my hand and brought up the Sesame Credit system in China as a bad application of AI, oppression via algorithm. The woman told me that wasn’t a bad thing and only a social good. The other panel members seemed to have read “Nudge” by Cass Sustein and thought it was a how-to manual whereas most of us see it as a warning.
So even if we don’t get a Singularity where machines turn into Gods, we’ll still get oppression by algorithm far beyond social media censorship.
And the people doing it will do it because they think it is ALL good.