https://doi.org/10.60965/bq31-tt86
Today’s debate about the perils and promises of artificial superintelligence is at once terrifyingly existential and astonishingly narrow. It is framed as a good vs. evil binary over humanity’s future: superabundant Utopia or humanity’s extinction. No-one can put a number on the probability of any outcome because the titans of Silicon Valley are accelerating into the unknown.
In this essay, author Alex de Waal argues that this framing misses what has already happened. AI has changed how we think, as members of a social-political collective. AI has hacked the operating system of society and is defining the questions to be posed and limiting the range of allowable answers to those questions.