Is the Human Race Making Itself Unnecessary?

AI could mean the first aliens we meet won’t be from another planet. They’ll be the ones we create.

“The first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.” — I.J. Good, Computer Scientist, 1960

On May 30, 2023, 350 big thinkers and business leaders in the world of artificial intelligence announced that AI posed an existential threat to you, me, and the rest of humanity. Remember that date because they may be right. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war …” — that’s the way they put it in their one-sentence statement. Even earlier than that, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking (before his death) all said essentially the same thing. [1]

Hawking put it this way. “Humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded by A.I.” This past June even the pope chimed in on the subject during the G7 Summit, asking nations to “safeguard a space for proper human control over…