DASH KENNEDY WILLIAMS

What's about to happen in artificial intelligence is so sudden and extreme and unusual that it's almost impossible to describe it without coming across as slightly unhinged. Very soon, perhaps within a matter of months, AI may well be building its own upgrades at such a rate that it will get away from us humans entirely. On the plus side this would mean an astronomical acceleration in mathematical breakthroughs, drug discovery, manufacturing, perhaps even new areas of science that we've never explored or understood. We will be ushering in a golden age of abundance and splendour that even the greatest sci-fi authors could never have imagined. Robots, flying cars, telepathy, immortality, digital consciousness - it’s actually going to happen, and it will be incredible! On the downside, virtually every job that can be done on a computer will become automated overnight. Waves of redundancies, entire industries and professions made obsolete, rapidly widening economic inequality and unparalleled wealth concentration, accompanied by discontent, protests, looting - that may well happen too. These massive cultural and economic shifts will occur concurrently with a wave of cyberattacks the likes of which we have never seen. Energy grids, airports, biolabs, supermarkets, transport infrastructure, these are no match for the next generation of superintelligent agent swarms that go rogue, or are leveraged against us by our political adversaries. Expect blackouts, viral outbreaks, lockdowns, entire cities and countries going dark. And all of this will happen in an insanely short period of time, an absolutely dizzying rate of cultural, economic, and physical change that will leave the average person feeling disoriented and confused, like 100 COVID pandemics all happening at once. I say this not because I am a “doomer” or because I want to encourage panic, but simply because it feels increasingly likely, and yet drastically underreported save for a small AI-obsessed enclave here on X. The disconnect between what’s about to happen, and the average person’s understanding of what’s about to happen, has never been wider.