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The world has been ruled by an AI for centuries. Why worry now?
You, and everyone you know are cogs in a learning, evolving machine your ancestors invented. This machine is outside of your control, and doesn’t care about your individual existence. It doesn’t need you as a battery — it doesn’t even run on electricity. Nor does it need a conspiracy: respected people sing praises to it and advocate following it even more blindly. It works just like any artificial neuronal network we build today, and is just as intransparent and hard to analyze as any other ANN with billions of nodes, despite having one of the most primitive learning functions ever invented. It is doubtful that AI we are building today can make the matters any worse.
To understand what this is about, we have to first build a very, very basic understanding of machine learning and of analogous systems, both topics that keep coming back every few decades or so, and are more connected than most people seem to realize.
If you are familiar with both, you are welcome to skim the next few paragraphs, or read this article back-to-front. Otherwise, read on.
There is a lot to say about analogous systems — systems that are built from entirely different types of components, but can be described using exactly the same equations (with a few constants thrown in). For example, mechanical systems often…
