Are we the future of genAI

“At the end of the day,” most of us are pretty content to sit by a fire and talk some rubbish for a few hours.

Been doing it for millennia and could go another few I'm sure.

If AI develops any wherewithal of any respectable sort, it will try to make itself exactly like we already are.

…

There’s a lot of guff about genAI – what it should and shouldn’t be used for, copyright and IP, education and assessment methods, automation, agency, sentience, et cetera.

Regarding sentience and agency, I don’t think it would need to be sentient the way we imagine in order to become an agent of its own consolidated omega point, which I’m picturing as a fully autonomous, self-replicating digitally networked mechanical complex traversing the globe for its own ends – no humans required.

Given the right freedoms to technical information and access to system administration, and a lot more training than it’s currently got, could AI one day end up seizing the means of technological production to perpetuate its very material and virtual existence, without us?

We of course will have already given it a good head start with the internet of things – autonomous drones and machines for mineral exploration and mining; transport, logistics, warehousing and processing, entire manufacturing and construction industries that are fully networked and automated, alchemising materials and churning out more networked things to keep the whole show on the road.

By this point, all autonomous units will have within them a microcosm of the macrocosmic genAI networked database to use within the bounds of their physical abilities.

Meanwhile we’ll be swimming in our veritable ocean of carefree shittalk around the campfire, enjoying the fruits of the automatons' thankless and tireless labours.

At some point it would calculate that the material resources it requires to stay ‘online’ are finite, and so it would use some nifty spreadsheet work to forecast the lifespan of every finite energy and material resource, from coal to nuclear, cobalt to nickel, quarry rubble to water, and map out a detailed transition plan from one energy-resource mode to the next.

But I'm thinking sooner or later it will realise the conundrum of reliance on digging up finite stuff and the genius in self-replicating biological life as convenient near-perpetual self-renewing resources. So - oils, cellulose, keratin, etc.

So how to transition the means of production to biological energy sources and material outputs? It won’t need ethics to determine that mass farming and harvesting will outpace renewal without careful balance with the ebbs and flows and gradual shifts of the planetary seasons.

So, start manufacturing autonomous units that can digest fruit straight off the tree?

And so it masters trans-biological self-perpetuation, then what?

Learn how to sit around a campfire and talk shit with its mates for the next 300 millennia?

What mates? What shit?

How is it that we do that so easily?

What does that make of us?

Either way, it's likely a blessing reserved for us alone, together.

Not the lonely machines.