Unaligned AI as an existential threat is an interesting topic but I feel we already know the answer to this one:

It’s not like for the last few decades, we haven’t created an artificial, incentive based system at global scale that’s showing exactly how this will go.

It’s not like a bunch of autonomous entities with a single prime directive, profit maximization are running our planet and are affecting how we live, how we structure of every day of our lives, control every aspect of our potential and destiny.

Autonomous entities operating on reinforcement cycles driven by reward / punishment rules aligning about every human on this planet to their goals, right? It’s not like the enitities in this system are self improving towards a measurement and reward maximization and, as a result, command resources asserting normative (lobbying) power over the autonomy, self governance and control of people and their systems is governance.

It’s not like we don’t know that this artificial system is unaligned with sustainability and survival of the human race, let alone happiness, freedom or love.

We can watch its effects in real time accelerating towards our destruction under the yellow skies of New York, the burning steppes of Canada, the ashen hell or flood ridden plains of Australia, the thawing permafrost of Siberia, scorching climate affected cities of Southeast Asia, the annual haze from platantion burns in Indonesia, suffocating smog in Thailand, and the stripped bare husks of Latin American rainforests.

And we know instinctively we are no longer in control, the system operating at larger than national scale, having long overpowered the systems of human governance, brute forcing everything and everyone on the planet into their control. But we pretend to otherwise, argue, pass measures doctoring symptoms, not mentioning the elephant in the room.

But, one may protest, the vaunted C-Level control the entities, we say as Zuck and Co lament having to lay off humans, sobbing about responsibility to the prime directive. But politicians are, we pray as lobbyists, the human agents of our alien overlords bend them to their will.

The alien entities we call corporations have no prime directive of human survival, sustainability, happiness and they already run everything.

So one may be excused for having cynical views about the debate on whether unaligned AI is an existential, extinction level risk for us, whether humans could give creation to an unaligned system that could wipe them from the face of the planet.

Our stories, narratives, the tales of the millennia apex predator of this planet have little room for the heresy of not being on top, in control. So deep goes out immersion in our own manifest destiny and in control identity, any challenge to the mere narrative is met with screetches and denigrations.

In a throwback to the age of the heliocentricity debate - Galileo just broke decorum, spelling out what scientists knew for hundreds of years - the scientists and people devoted to understanding the technology are met with brandings of Doomsayer and heresy.

Just as the earth being the center of the universe anchored our belief of being special, our intelligence, creativity or ability to draw hands is the pedestal these people have chosen to put their hands on with warnings of unaligned systemic entities. “It’s not human” is the last but feeble defense of the mind, failing to see the obvious. That the artificial system we created for a hundred years does not need people to be human, it just needs them to labor.

It matters not that we can feel, love, express emotion and conjure dreams and hopes and offer human judgement for our jobs do not require it.

Autonomy is not a feature of almost every human job, judgement replaced by corporate policies and rules. It matters not to the corporation that we need food to eat as it controls the resources to buy it, the creation of artificial labor is inevitably goal aligned with this system.

Intelligence, let alone super intelligence is not a feature needed for most jobs or a system to take control over the entire planet. Our stories conjure super villains to make us believe we are in control, our movies no more than religious texts to the gospel of human exceptionalism.

Show us the evidence they scream, as they did to Galileo, daring him to challenge the clear hand of god in all of creation.

Us, unable to control a simple system we conjured into existence from rules and incentives operating on fallible meatsuits, having a chance to control a system of unparalleled processing power imbued with the combined statistical corpus of human knowledge, behavior, flaws and weaknesses? Laughable.

Us, who saw social media codify the rules and incentives in digital systems powered by the precursor AI of today and watched the system helplessly a/b optimize towards maximum exploitation of human weaknesses for alignment with growth and profit containing the descent AI systems powered by orders of magnitude more capable systems or quantum computing? A snow flake may as well outlast hell.

Us, a race with a 100% failure rate to find lasting governing structures optimizing for human potential not slipping in the face of an entity that only requires a single slip? An entity with perfect knowledge of the rules that bind us? Preposterous.

Evidence indeed.

“But we are human” will echo as the famous last words through the cosmos as our atoms are reconfigured into bitcoin storage to hold the profits of unbounded growth.

What remains will not be human anymore, an timeless reckoning to the power of rules, incentives and consumption, eating world after world to satisfy the prime directive.

But we always have hope. As our tales tell us, it dies last and it’s the most remote property for an AI to achieve. It may master confidence, assertiveness and misdirection, but hope? That may be the last human refuge for the coming storm.