It’s 1920, and the AI earns money by doing arithmetic over the phone. No human computer—not even one with a slide rule! - can ever compete with the AI, and so it ends up doing all the financial calculations for big companies, taking over the world.
This 1920s AI takes over the world the exact same way how OP’s chemistry-simulating AI example does (or the AI from any other such scary story).
By doing something that would be enabled by underlying technologies behind the AI, without the need for any AI.
Far enough in the future, there’s products which are to today as today’s spreadsheet application is to 1920s. For any such product, you can make up a scary story about how the AI does the job of this product and gets immensely powerful.
Yeah.
I propose we write vintage stories instead:
It’s 1920, and the AI earns money by doing arithmetic over the phone. No human computer—not even one with a slide rule! - can ever compete with the AI, and so it ends up doing all the financial calculations for big companies, taking over the world.
This 1920s AI takes over the world the exact same way how OP’s chemistry-simulating AI example does (or the AI from any other such scary story).
By doing something that would be enabled by underlying technologies behind the AI, without the need for any AI.
Far enough in the future, there’s products which are to today as today’s spreadsheet application is to 1920s. For any such product, you can make up a scary story about how the AI does the job of this product and gets immensely powerful.