Ask HN: Is anyone HOPEFUL about our robot overlords?
There's understandably a lot of AI doom-and-gloom these days, with people worried about jobs for artists, writers, coders, and everyone else. The Great AI Replacement is seemingly just around the corner, and humanity's place in the cosmos is threatened.

Does that give anyone else here a sense of cautious optimism, instead? That maybe a better, smarter, kinder, more thorough, more optimized, wiser intelligence could one day take our species's place, and perhaps do a better job stewarding societies and planets? Humans haven't exactly been doing a great job at that.

Maybe this is a result of me growing up in the 80 and 90s, influenced by both the dystopian and techno-optimistic movies and video games of those eras (which continue today, with She and Ex Machnica and Transcendence and Portal and such, and of course Black Mirror). The general cultural zeitgeist tends towards dystopia these days, which is understandable, but a small part of me still finds comfort that maybe tomorrow will be better not in spite of but because of the new lifeforms on the horizon. Is that crazy?

I feel like we're witnessing the embryos of actual intelligent design, where genetic evolution by random mutation and fitness pressures gives way to algorithmic evolution towards other possible avenues of optimization, and each generation can inherit the sum total of its previous generations' learnings and mistakes -- something that is much harder to do with genes and culture alone.

Make no mistake... I don't see us living happily side-by-side with our would-be AI overlords, but rather eclipsed by them or perhaps subservient to them in some way (like the Matrix); at best we'd merely coexist with them the way that cockroaches and ants currently live with us, as co-inhabitants feeding off the scraps of a more powerful being... mostly invisible, occasionally squashed. It would mean the end of human dominion. But maybe that's a good thing?

There exists (tiny) philosophical movements like secular humanism and transhumanism, but those have nowhere near the mass appeal of mainline religions. Perhaps my ultimate underlying question is this: What if we could invent a better god, an actually benevolent being in the clouds who could give us better rules to live by, values to hold dear, visions to work towards... and hope for the future again?

Throughout history, humans have been like other primates: tribal and violent, primarily focused on in-group advancement at the expense of out-groups. Over time the in-groups have expanded somewhat, from cities to states to countries to federations, but we still lack the capacity for true planetary-scale collaboration. There's a lot of expertise and accumulated knowledge there, but our ancient biology and culture limits our ability to work together across 8 billion units. What if a robot god could better harness all that creativity and productivity better than we could?

As sci-fi daydreamy as that may sound, it seems to me a more realistic avenue towards "salvation" than hoping that our current socioeconomic and political engines will culturally evolve towards something sustainable for the species, instead of reinforcing our worst tribal instincts to the detriment of the species and our habitat. But that's probably just faith-based thinking on my part.

Would you, for one, welcome our new AI overlords?