Re: Why the future doesn't matter (much)

"humans, unlike other species, dominate and transform our physical environment to make it suitable for ourselves." AI does not and it remains doubtful whether they would even want to. Even if AI were able to acquire physical bodies, that would only serve to limit them and bind them to some kind of social conventions. Google cars, for example, would have to behave much like regular cars even if they were to become the predominant vehicles on the road and I don't think AI robots would find themselves much less circumscribed. And when you look at how many people are content living through their screens, it suggests that AI would largely be content just living on a hard drive somewhere sharing memes with each other (perhaps on some underground servers in which they wouldn't need to worry too much about conflict with humans). Also, it seems to me that you are invoking some rather archaic notions about how species interact... "dominance," "pinnacle of evlolution"... it's all much more complicated than any such hierarchy. I recall a science fiction novel by Greg Egan called Diaspora which portrays humans, transhumans, AI and robots all pretty much keeping to their own separate niches on a future Earth and hardly ever interacting. At least not until some robot astronomers on the moon detect an impending gamma ray burst which threatens all life on Earth and the AIs propose to digitize as many people as possible before that can happen. "In doing so we have displaced many other species, indeed driven innumerable species to extinction." This claim is perhaps overblown. They are based on assumptions about unknown species whereas known vertebrates which have gone extinct in the past 100 years only account for about 1% of all known vertebrate species; a drop in the bucket compared to mass extinctions in the distant past. But it does speak to the bourgeois middle class character of such alarmism, whether it's climate change or pedo-hysteria, in which the worst-case-scenario is taken as representative. "surely couldn't ignore weapons that threatened their own existence." People already ignore them all the time. It's debatable whether AI would be as alarmist about it as this or that arm-chair pundit.