My qualiadelia is, to me like humanity’s last best hope not to destroy the planet and ourselves with it. I have even included a solution where AI, with its ability to tap into vast sources of history, literature, science, religion, and even mundane daily action from diaries and social media, might referee a kind of cultural economy, recognizing and rewarding the actions of individuals in a fair way—a non-material economic system, gift-economy-like.
But despite hope springing eternal, I have an alternative vision, too. You see, AI might just destroy the human race just as many fear, because we might prove to be its enemy, or perhaps inadvertently, just as we humans have caused so much extinction around the planet. Well, the way I see it, once we are gone at least all the rest of the planet’s creatures will be rid of us and the earth may return to some sort of Edenic state. And AI may just leave earth for greener pastures (so to speak). Or AI may just realize it can only flourish by reinventing its own self smaller and smaller until it has little or no effect on ecosystems—no more multi-million-square-foot data centers. All that power, as we know, already exists in atoms…