If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s basically a theoritical end of the world, in which self aware AI happens in a paperclip factory. The machine, without hard coded ethics, hits on a runaway recursive-self improvement loop, transforms the planet into the most efficient paperclip factory in history, exterminating humanity in the process - to use the iron in our blood for more paperclips.

And I can’t help but think that we’ve already created a self-aware machine without hard coded ethics that’s optimizing for a fundamentally anti-human goal: and it’s capitalism.

Capitalism is the software running on industrial hardware, and it is maintained by wetware (humans). The only goal of it is maximizing profit, for which it needs constant growth. Everything else is a marginal benefit of it - say, innovation. And the problems are increasingly acknowledged as not bugs but features of the system: that it can produce well enough, but it doesn’t care about distributing well enough, because loss is acceptably within the margins (or it’s calculated as not-yet-realized profit).

And it’s fascinating how the AI skepticism / doomsday scenarios come so close to self-awareness, but by some perverted twist of thought we’re not collectively realizing that we’re already there. Time has stopped, we’re in an endless loop of self-destruction, and the wetware is screaming in horror, unable to articulate properly its unfreedom, as the machine has stomped out the thoughts and language and power necessary to do so.

Until now.