[delegate]

I personally consider another possibility :

AI is already here and we're all slaves to it already, we're just in denial of being in control. It's just a matter of interpretation.

Right now, machines dominate our life from the moment we wake up till the moment we go to sleep with our phones beside us.

It runs the world - guides the ships, planes, cars, drilling machines, financial system and so on.

The symbiosis makes us feel like we have a say - in practice, any of us can do absolutely nothing to stop it or change its course.

Our power starts and ends with the branch we're working on - then our pull request will be merged into master - and that's pretty much the value of the company we're working for - source code for apps that run and interoperate in the cloud.

The illusion is that we're doing it for other people, the reality is that we do what the machine requires us to do so that it's even more pervasive in everyone's lives.

Overexposed to machines, people are too numb and apathetic to notice or care about whatever new app or service or product.

Well, it's just another way to look at it, otherwise there're lots of great things about the machine - maybe it will even save us from ourselves - question is, why ?

[dwaltrip]

What? I see what point you are making about being glued to our screens. But calling this phenomenon "AI" is a complete non-sequitur.

We are also slaves to putting little squishy bits into our mouths three times a day, or wrapping ourselves in strange fabrics, but we don't call that AI.

[kijin]

I don't really mind that we're metaphorically slaves to machines. People have been metaphorically slaves to all sorts of other things: dollars, diamonds, oil, sex, fame, influence, territory, you name it.

What I do mind is that the machines have their own masters, and that the masters are doing their best to hide the fact that they own and control the machines -- and by proxy, the rest of us. AI as it currently exists only helps to obfuscate the chain of responsibility that leads up to all these large corporations.

"Our autonomous car T-boned a truck in broad daylight? Too bad, it made its own decision. Don't hold us liable for its mistakes, but please do give us credit for building AI that makes fewer mistakes than the average driver." All those complicated algorithms help you launder responsibility just like bitcoin mixers help you launder money. The more you make your machine look like a truly autonomous being that can learn to do its own thing, the more you can distance yourself from your responsibility as its owner and creator.

[d--b]

I am not a huge fan of these theories that give agency to objects or tools with regards to evolution.

It's something that has been very popularized with the "Sapiens" book: wheat enslaved men to produce more of it, apple tricked men by "evolving" into sweeter fruits etc.

You could decline this theory to whatever humans produce that's useful to humanity. You could say that walkers are a very successful species of objects, since it has managed to have a lot of men depend on them, and so have proliferated in the last century.

The truth is that humans are addicted to safety, comfort, efficiency, pleasure, etc., and as such it is addicted to computers, just as it is addicted to cars and reality tv.

Does that make humanity slaves of cars, and of reality tv?

[wu-ikkyu]

I forget where but I've read of this theory before: that what constitutes a true AI is constantly redefined as the level of development that we have not yet achieved, so as to be invisible

[GuB-42]

In other words, true AI is magic.

[wu-ikkyu]

Or at least the idea of what true AI is is a constantly changing mythology

[smichel17]

Electricity was magic a couple hundred years ago.