AI: Why its going to ruin my life!

I’m not sure if I’m the only person who sees this for what it is. I can’t be, but it seems it sometimes. In my last article I wrote about the glamors of Artificial Intelligence(AI), but upon pondering a while longer I have come to realize that it will be the demise of culture and civilization as we know it.

If I have the ability to generate a fully visualized world where I can attain any material object or experience any lifestyle, living as anybody I choose or inhabit my world with computer controlled clones of individuals of my choosing.

I see several troublesome scenarios:

Firstly let us assume I have the money and means to purchase the required equipment and pay the necessary fees to avail of the current ‘hottest’ virtual tech.

I wake up in the morning, I get up and do the usual routine of washing up and having my shower, I then slip into some comfy tracksuit bottoms with nanotechnology integrated into every square nanometer of the material. This tech is monitoring my vitals, keeping my insurance and medical services up to date with my body’s condition on a need to know basis.
I eat my breakfast that has been prepared perfectly to fit my body’s current needs and designed to fit my genetic profile, thus giving me the exact required nutrients I need.

I go to my virtual reality node or pod or whatever it is that I would use to connect to the virtual world.

I jack in and I go to my virtual office space and work for several hours. At clocking out time, I decide to log on to my favorite RPG, the latest Star Wars game whichever it will be.

My character awakens from their resting place, I’m now in a world of infinite size in which I have the full ability to do whatever I wish.

Now because I know its a game and has no real effect on my external reality, I know I’m free to murder,rape and pillage to my hearts content without suffering any real consequences.

I also may just decide to flick on ‘God Mode’ and go on a massacre, after all, they are just made up of bits and bytes right? 1s and 0s? But what happens when this indistinguishable world with its indistinguishable experience has a psychologically immersible effect in my external reality?

What happens when I log out of my world where I am technically a God within the computer system.

I walk outside and without a thought, I attack and maim someone, because I’ve learned a new behavior and habit to attack anyone who might be about to pull out a gun or what I perceive to be the revelation of a weapon.

Will it get to a stage where people will lose the ability to discern between realities?

How about if I decide to live in a ‘perfect’ world. When I say perfect, I define it as being a world that matches my routine and lifestyle perfectly, not a world without opposition or without balance, but just a world tailored to my fancy, green neon sky, everything is edible and tastes great, people walk around naked without a bother for embarrassment (because its comfortable), my favorite superheroes and movie characters live right around the corner, I can experience the mental effect of any drug without ever putting my body at risk. I can do ANYTHING I wish, none of it costing me a penny more than the cost of running the computer and or fees to use the software to connect to my virtual world.

How about if I decided to connect my body up to an automated life support system and live in this virtual world permanently? The ultimate in escapism fantasy! Its perfectly possible and even likley that one fool will try such a thing!

Moving away from the personal catastrophies that would result, the reduction in culture, the binding force that holds societies together, the thing that makes you and your neighbor and community members feel that sense of togetherness. The feeling of a country united in spirit will soon disappear. People will migrate to these worlds while culture becomes extinct.

Now, you might say, ‘We can regulate the usage’ or ‘We can decide what people can and can’t experience and the time they can spend inside these worlds’ – not a chance, you guys will be the first to go 🙂

How do you regulate something that can be easily manipulated. You are the same fools who think that electronic piracy prevention is enough to foil counter fitters. In reality – the internet is not a place of censorship, it is ridden with websites that glorify propagate illegal, sickening, racist, violent or political/religious bullshit and fills the world wide web with an eternal cache of the worlds weirdest shit.

“What happens on the internet – will stay on the internet”

The main fear I have is that we will all become consumerist slobs who live the lives of a mook, only really living for the next big fad or the coolest new gadget, completely forgeting about indivuality and the fact that culture and society matter as a corner stone of human civilization.

Yes, culture and society can evolve, but what happens when an organisim can’t evolve at the desired rate to survive? They go extinct. If we create super-intelligent machines, that can defy the logic of our greatest minds, that can compute and improve themselves or ”evolve” at whatever rate they desire and even more to the point, at an infinite rate! If we can’t adapt and find a way to keep up then we will find ourselves on the recieving end of some asswhopping by a superior intellect that will cause the human race to fall back to insignificant numbers and eventually – blip…nothing!

Other than that though, it is going to be so awesome 😀

Just a thought!