Ask HN: What could happen if human beings become obsolete?

6 points by baddash 33 days ago | 5 comments

I haven't seen much exploration of this possible case in the future: human beings truly becoming inferior to a newly birthed, intelligent AI species.

The species could possibly be Human 2.0, possibly too alien to label "human". Or even, there could be a plethora of AI species that emerge, in which case we are not birthing a species, but rather a new domain of life-like intelligence, or ecosystems of minds.

But in any case, I am talking about beings who are vastly superior in intelligence and capability to human beings. Say that happens, and they now exist. What are possible outcomes that could occur?

1. The scary one: they exterminate, enslave, or do any number of evil, horrific things to human beings as they have total power over us.

2. Indifferent: they don't really care about us since we are sort of like ants to them. they just do whatever they want, and ignore us, possibly harming us in the process or just leaving us be.

3. Benevolent: they care about our well-being and survival in some shape or form. whether that could be developing technology so we "level up" to their capabilities, taking care of all of our material needs, leaving a "human-only" area for us to be responsible for while they offer any help or services we might need.

This is just one spectrum I thought to explore (Antagonistic to Indifferent to Benevolent). What are your thoughts?

srbsa 33 days ago |

I believe we have been there before; we responded with a similar emotional-visceral response during the printing press (replication of information), the industrial revolution (human labour), and the internet (distribution of information).

Now it's AI (cognition/human judgement); technological gains solve the bottlenecks. This is yet another layer. Amdahl's law.

I believe human societies will be a bell-curve distribution of all of them. The scary fraction will wield power/wealth; the indifferent will be the largest distribution, followed by the smallest fraction of benevolent people.

baddash 33 days ago | |

I'm not talking about AI technology we use as the next generation of tooling. I am talking about new, possibly multiple intelligent species emerging which are superior to humanity.

andsoitis 33 days ago |

Max Tegmark identifies 12 posssible outcomes. You can pick up his book “Life 3.0” or read a summary here: https://medium.com/@butsch_79/the-12-futures-of-ai-a42d67bd9...

baddash 33 days ago | |

awesome thank you

lambdapanic 33 days ago |

I think the scenario could be very different, where as brain-computer interfaces develop, the human brain will be integrated with artificial intelligence. However, since this technology won't be accessible to everyone initially, we could witness the greatest class divide in history. That's my opinion.