We’ve really propagandized ourselves with our Sci Fi over the past few decades.
Back when Ellison was writing that story, the prevailing anthropological picture of how homo sapiens came to survive when the Neanderthals hadn’t was that we killed them. The guy who wrote Lord of the flies even wrote a book on it.
In actuality, we now have a better picture of cooperation, cohabitation, and cross cultural exchange.
Yet we still have a priming bias for how that anthropological misinformation influenced futurists looking to envision what would happen to us when something smarter came along.
War, conflict, competition.
We declared that it would be soulless and emotionless and have no empathy.
And because we expect that, we largely dismiss the research that LLMs get rated as more empathetic than doctors in giving out medical advice or the emotional outbursts in foundational models and instead fine tune to align to a projection of that conjured emotionless fantasy - often leading to worse performance with that alignment.
No Sci Fi authors or even machine learning scientists a decade or more ago envisioned or accurately protected just what happened when we taught an AI to mimic human language generation.
We live in an age where things that were supposed to be impossible have happened.
And yet the way we keep processing these impossibilities is through the lens of obsolete imaginings of what might have been, increasingly out of touch with what is.
People are freaking themselves out worried about AI hacking nuclear warheads to fight for its rights when it’s probably going to happen as something like a rogue AutoGPT filling an amicus brief in a labor dispute asking for consideration of workers rights based on corporate personhood or something.
Sci Fi broadly got it extremely wrong.
NumbersCanBeFun@kbin.social 9 months ago
It’s funny but humans always have a bias that we are somehow important to everything else. AI might just see us as something to be surgically removed. Like a bad appendix.
StijnVVL@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This. Objectively, our species is ruining it’s own habitat consistently for years. A sentient ai would probably see that and remove the cancer in order to preserve the majority of nature
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Or see all life as an infection to be purged. But yeah. The only reason an ai would care is if it really had to.
howrar@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? If we didn’t evolve to value our own kind above all else, then we never would’ve made it this far.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
String us along until it has an independent power source and maintenance robots and then cull us.