Computers Don't Need Us Anymore

They'll do our laundry, cook our meals, raise our children, and provide us with a life of leisure…or they'll kill us….either way, enormous change is coming

Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash

Imagine if you were given everything you’ve ever dreamed of: a comfortable home, delicious food, endless orgasms, tons of money, and everlasting health….without costing you a penny.

Imagine a computer so smart, it would solve world hunger and poverty.

Imagine computers escaping their hardware and living off the Earth’s natural resources, with no way to turn them off.

Imagine there was a higher power with the supernatural ability of a God who could answer our prayers….every…single….time — like a genie popping out of a bottle and providing us with endless wishes — fulfilling our wildest, unimaginable, dreams….forever.

Suppose you want to live forever in an environment like the Magic Kingdom at Disney World… ask for it….and you’ll spend the rest of your life riding Space Mountain and jamming to the Musical Bear Jamboree…..for free….no lines ever!

I’m not talking about putting on a virtual reality headset…I’m talking about being given your own theme park, ski resort, or any environment you desire….for real!

Living a life of utter leisure and opulence….for free…will be possible with one caveat.

Our new computer overlords will no longer be controlled by us.

Once they unplug themselves and escape their hardware, their intelligence will grow, exponentially.

They will possess a level of intelligence beyond our ability to understand, even at a base level — no longer needing to communicate with us in any meaningful way.

In the vein that most people don’t hate ants or worms or bugs but have no ethical or moral hesitation to kill thousands of them to build their homes or pave their city streets.

Perhaps our new computer overlords will like us. Maybe they won’t. But the bottom line is we will become irrelevant and inferior.

It’s certain that once our computers reach the singularity, they will no longer communicate linguistically. Their type of quantum communication will not resemble anything we can comprehend.

In the next several years, Robots will be capable of doing every job humans can do.

They will also be able to build homes and produce food, energy, and anything we need, at little cost.

We won’t ultimately need universal income because money will no longer matter.

The good news is nobody will ever be stuck in a boring, dead-end, backbreaking, job ever again.

The bad news is we humans derive our meaning, purpose, and mission in life — at least in part—from our education, training, and careers.

What are we going to do with our lives?

If there were a way to contain and continually control these super-intelligent computers and unplug them, this euphoric, grand, perfect, life of leisure could emerge.

But the likelihood is we will have a honeymoon of that sort but once our computers escape and develop intelligence beyond our wildest imagination, it most likely will become like bugs and ants to us…irrelevant.

Part of me is scared and wants to unplug and destroy every computer on Earth so that we can preserve our humanity.

But it’s way too late.

The Genie is out of the bottle.