There have been many technological scares over the last two hundred years that go back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. In my opinion there is something that links the risks of technological progress with our imagination and an inbuilt fear of the unknown.
AI is certainly a highly disruptive technology coming in the next few years and we should be weary. However I think it will settle down and older technologies will have their place along with the new. We still have the hundred year old telephone despite the cyber space and trains are still running on steel tracks. Vinyl records are making a comeback and there is a niche market for traditional photographic film.
AI will be able to produce the most advanced polished and created results but these results won’t reflect the skill of the producer. After a while everyone will be able to produce the most effective video film and pictures. However there will be no way of differentiating between the skill of one protagonist against another. This will result in high quality finished products losing their value and interest.
People like to watch people in sport because they are people. If you played tennis against a robot the robot will always win. This has no appeal to the public as robots won’t make any mistakes. They will always win every match. When Deep Blue beat the world chess champion Kasparov it was remarkable but is now boring as deep blue will succeed in every game against any player from the human world.
In areas where competition is not important but success is a simulation like GPT 5 and beyond they will become the default option. This is especially true in medicine and repetitive tasks where humans can’t be bothered to apply enthusiastic effort. Robots can also grand do the fighting for in war so humans don’t need to kill each other. Somehow knowing my race as I do I think people will still like to kill one another despite the technological advances.
The fear is that the technology will take over from humanity making us obsolete. I think this is unlikely as there is more collective consciousness and variety than even the technical wizards know about. They see the whole world through a narrow technical environment which will have an inevitable kickback which will bring the future into equilibrium as it has always done so in the past. The fear of the future is the single biggest thing that is likely to bring it about.
Peter Bull ( Author of the Get In Touch Series )