What does it mean “to be human”? What will it mean to be human when the things that quintessentially make up the human condition are being handled by an AI?

People talk about these rosy futures involving loads of free time waiting for us when AI takes over, but is that what anyone actually wants? Will people find purpose with all of this time to “be human”?

And an AI taking over certainly does not free humanity from bullshit. At best, it frees up potential bandwidth. But we’ve been freeing humanity from “bullshit” for decades/centuries now, and as a species, we haven’t shown a tendency to use that freed time well.

I’m not against advancing technology, but I don’t think we have any reason to believe in these kinds of utopian visions.

I'm currently on a work sabbatical, and while it has been great, I reached a point when I had to start actively scheduling and doing things or I'd go a bit crazy. I think that having time to be bored is great, and really healthy for awhile. But having a core thing to return to, whatever that is, seems really critical.

I'm sure humanity could adapt, but would need time to adjust to the new reality.

Ironically, AI has been feeding us more bullshit then I've ever seen. I'm excited to see what things will look like when all the AI "gurus" and prompt "engineers" get off this train and move on to some other hype.

- Immanuel Kant on how adversities often develop our skills and enhance our capacities

(Before you say "that can't happen", the AGI is going to run on some hardware. Someone is going to have access to that hardware. For that matter, someone is going to write the program, and supply the training data, and do the testing.)

History, unfortunately, shows this rarely, if ever, to be this case. Every utopian ideal of the 20th century ended in mass murder, world war, or totalitarianism, and the more pragmatic ones (e.g. liberal democracy) are struggling desperately to survive. One only need to consider the current political state of the two most powerful countries in the world developing AI (the US and China), to not take such a Panglossian view of how it will be used.

The former is making a fire to heat your home, the latter is the mindset of a pyromaniac.

It is certainly possible that humanity meets some obstacle short of AGI, or civilization collapses to the point that no further technological development is possible.

Are we really more free?

Besides what makes me unhappy is frequently people not technology.

Keynes et al assumed that humanity would align around machines to literally eliminate human labor.

Those of us that have been obsessed with AI since we were toddlers have been literally talking about this since day one

Welcome to the party everyone

In a manner of speaking, of course.

The endgame in many long range cruise missiles are based on computer vision systems

Here’s the tomahawk specifically: https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/Content/techdigest/pdf/...

I personally witnessed tomahawk used extensively throughout the GWOT

You just rarely hear about it

In watching the internet come into being and become what it is today, I assume that it will be abused and misused significantly. The idea of weaponizing misinformation wasn't on my bingo card, so I'm much more cynical now.