What happens once we replace all humanity with AI?
Let me start by saying this: I am not a doomer, or at least, I'm trying my best to keep my head up. But ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public I have not even once felt good about it. I do believe that artificial intelligence is good and should be studied, but the fact that a ot of corporations got it's greedy hands on generative AI worries me.
What's the point of AI?
Now that's great question. The term "AI" here is used as the generative AI the interenet has been possesed with lately. What is the point of it? Why would we want to make endless crappy texts, ugly pictures, weird music? Why do we want to steal voices? Somebody on tumblr was talking about AI fanfic and they said
Why should I bother reading something that the author didn't bother writing?
And that stuck me deeply. Why do we have this? Why does every single app and online store need to have a freaking
chatbot? Like, outside of investors who don't know any better than chasing the new hype technologies, who benefits
from all of this?
My mum keeps asking me, Who is it for? And I just can't come up with satisfactory answer.
Until one day while browsing one of the countless social media sites, I read something among the lines "The goal is
to eliminate payroll".
I mean, it makes sense, right? Huge companies are already jumping on the trend of firing
employees in favour of AI, saving on salaries and benefits. My cousin told me about a company that fired all it's
developers, because "the AI can code better". In the end the company have to hire software maintenece team once every
quater, meaning they don't save any money anyway. Now I don't know how true that is, but it feels scarily real.
Hypothetical future
Let's say that this huge plan works out. Imagine that the AI is so advanced it emits all the odd behaviour we're
observing today. Imageine we figured out all the problems with power, water consumption, CO2 production and whatever
else is stopping the addaptation of generative AI en masse.
Image a future where more than half of your interaction comes from AI "employees".