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This article may be more fear porn...

Or it may be a wise warning ‘from the inside’;

But I guess I’m a neo-Luddite too, even though I love my computers and spend most of my ‘awake-time’ on one, or sometimes more than one..

But I have had a major antipathy to the whole concept of AI since it started gathering major steam a few years ago. I’m old enough to have seen that early documentary film: “Colossus; The Forbin Project” on its first run in theaters and of course that more recent documentary starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton, and I’m just glad I’m old enough to be likely dead of natural causes before some AI program decides that I am useless and sends out a termination order.

I’ve written software since I was 11 (in 1981). I’ve slinged all kinds of code from assembler (many different CPU’s) to Pascal, C, Java, Perl, Ruby, Lisp, and probably some others that I’ve forgotten about.

I truly believe AI will lead us to a dystopia like we’ve never seen, especially once humanoid robots become a thing. Every job that doesn’t require lots of physical strength will eventually be done by some form of AI. The jobs that require no (or little) physical strength will go first, but over time you’ll see jobs requiring more and more physical strength being done by AI-enabled robots.

This will be terrible for the human condition. Sure, we might have it “easy”, assuming the machines don’t — rightly, in fact — decide we have have no further usefulness and should be eradicated. The simple fact, though, is that PEOPLE NEED PURPOSE. As much as I loathe left-wing Star Trek, in one of their movies they actually said something I agree with: “when you make a machine to do the job of a man, you take something away from the man”.

We *need* struggle (or whatever you want to call it) for life to be worth living. A world where we can all sit on our backsides and do nothing, having everything we need to survive provided for us, would be a boring, stagnant existence. Moreover, we need to feel useful and needed, which I would argue is the definition of needing a “fulfilling” life.

Ubiquitous AI will absolutely destroy this.