THE POD BAY DOORS

The great fear of AI – voiced by millions, and in particular the two youngest generations – is that AI is here to replace us. That’s not an unreasonable fear, in a social media climate where so many (including more than a few actual industry players) are hell-bent on doomposting exactly that message, day in and out. It’s certainly true that there’s a vast population of capitalists out there who would be quite pleased to cut their workforces by 90% or more. Well, they’re capit

We’ve been well-prepped for maleficent AI by our movies, TV and books for decades now (HAL 9000, Skynet, the Cylons), but we’ve seen enough of the real thing to understand that evil AI in the here-and-now is, well, hovering in the wings. A real thing. A thing to take seriously. We can easily see what that can mean, and it now becomes our task to decide what we can do about it. The first step is figuring out what “good” and “evil” are, in AI terms, and what options we have in

The AI doomscroll is now a 24/7 thing, it looks like. Open any social media channel, day or night, and bam! AI is 1) taking all our jobs, 2) smothering all human creativity, or 3) sacrificing us by the millions to scarf up water for new data centers. And in the midst of all this teeth-gnashing we get word of an experiment by Emergence AI, a US startup that undertook to test several leading AI models to see how well they would do if put in charge of us all. In this experiment,