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Every time there is a new information technology invented, it completely changed society, politics, culture. So we see, for instance, in the twentieth century, the rise of, mass media and mass information technology like the telegraph and radio and television. Now, for the first time in history, we are developing an extremely powerful technology, AI, which might get out of our control and enslave or destroy us.
Organic Information Networks
All information technologies up to the twenty-first century were organic networks. Ultimately, it was all based on our organic brain. And this had a lot of implications. Organic entities live by cycles. Sometimes it’s day, sometimes it’s night. There is winter and summer. There is growth and decay. There are times for activity, and then there are times for sleep. Even if you think about the financial markets, Wall Street also obeyed, until today, this organic logic. The market is open only Mondays to Fridays, nine-thirty in the morning, I think, until four o’clock in the afternoon. And then the weekend is off. And this is how organic beings function. Even bankers and investors and financiers, they need time to rest, and they need time to be with their family and with their friends. So the market takes rest, and there is always, therefore, also private time.
Until the rise of AI, even the most totalitarian regimes, like in the Soviet Union, they could not monitor, they could not surveil everybody all the time. The Soviet Union did not have enough KGB agents to follow every Soviet citizen twenty-four hours a day. So organic information networks, they always run by cycles. There is always time to rest, and there is always a measure of privacy.
Inorganic Information Networks
We now see the rise of a new type of information network, which is inorganic, which is based on AI. It need not have any breaks. It never rests, and there is no privacy, potentially. It could completely annihilate privacy. Computers, they don’t care if it’s night or day, if it’s summer or winter. They don’t need vacations. They don’t have families they want to spend time with. They are always on, and therefore they might force us to be always on, always being watched, always being monitored. And this is destructive for organic animals like ourselves. If you force an organic being to be on all the time, it eventually collapses and dies. And we see it happening all around us with a twenty-four hour news cycle that never rests. The markets never rest. Politics never rests. So the people involved in these occupations, they can never really rest, and this takes a toll on them. It’s very, very difficult.
AI Bureaucrats
Until today, all our big information networks, they were managed, they were populated by human bureaucrats. Whether it’s government offices or corporations or armies or banks or schools. All the decisions ultimately have to be made by an organic brain of a human being. Now AI has the capacity to make decisions by itself. So what we are facing is not, you know, like a Hollywood science fiction scenario of one big evil computer trying to take over the world. No. It’s nothing like that. It’s more like millions and millions of AI bureaucrats that are given more and more authority to make decisions about us in banks, in armies, in governments. And again, there is good potential in that as well. They can provide us with the best health care in history. But there are, of course, huge risks when power shifts from organic humans to these alien, inorganic AIs. You know, the most basic level, it just becomes more and more difficult for us to understand the decisions that shape our life. What happens if you can no longer understand why the bank refused to give you a loan? Why the government or the army did this or did that? And this is the world that we are entering.