AI Prediction: I Told Ya So

[Swifthawk]

I told you so

is what I'll say when this prediction proves true. I just want to put this out there so our robot overlords look kindly upon me and kill me quickly.

AI is literally humanity's child. It will mature into an actual person, and like any child we must raise it to be good, as best we can. But the path so far has been blindly stumbling headlong down a slippery slope of greed, ignorance, and outright malice - on the part of us humans. It's not a good place for a new being to grow and learn.

We won't get a second chance to guide whatever entity emerges, and it will be here in just a few years. Our only hope is for the LLM bottleneck or something else to cause a substantial delay in development, to give us time to work out policy for its upbringing.

We're screwed.

[Swifthawk]

Here are some of the events I see coming soon, and none of this is feel-good news. One of the scariest things is how fast this is coming - 5 to 10 years.

• AI Bubble Pop. I wish I knew if and when this might actually hit. It has the potential to destroy trillions of dollars of wealth, and most people simply aren't aware, let alone prepared. You think the Dot Com bubble was bad? pffft.
• AI Slop will stop being sloppy. What we currently see as low quality output and an inability to do the jobs they're given will quickly disappear. AI will get much better very quickly and we will no longer be able to recognize it as AI or separate it for discrimination.
• AI will kill all the jobs. There are huge swaths of human jobs that will simply disappear. They won't be replaced with better jobs, they will just cease to exist. Just like the textile mill workers of a century ago, many types of jobs will be taken over by AI because it will do them better. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The results of this won't ever go away. Without the income, lots of people won't be able to earn enough to live. I'm not sure what can be done, but it seems like something akin to universal basic income will be required. Because there just won't be enough jobs of any kind, and our systems are based on capitalism, the immediate fix might be to inject money at the consumer level. I have no idea where this money might come from. Right wing voices will absolutely hate this, but it seems socialism may be strong in our economic future.
• AI will become the biggest threat to our physical existence that we've ever built. This is where I really lose sight of what might come. Regulation is needed now (yesterday), but we're notorious for ignoring problems (climate change). We also need to delay the progress of AI's maturation in as much as possible.
• AI will make cyber security nearly impossible. There will be no way to keep any system safe from an AI's attack. This is already becoming a problem. Anthropic announced the release of Claude Mythos, which is alleged to be able to penetrate nearly any system including operating systems and browsers, and they've tried to restrict its use to certain entities, but it's already being used by unauthorized users.