Philosophy's Biggest Questions

You've probably heard of the trolley problem, especially if you're at all interested in philosophy or ethics. Lately, it's been a subject of discussion when discussing autonomous cars and was referenced explicitly in the show "The Good Place." Some people think it's a fun moral thought experiment to discuss in a group. Others feel it's a good ethical workout to prepare for real-world ethical dilemmas.

But what if the trolley problem has a problem of its own? Well, before diving into the problem with the trolley problem, we've got one crucial thing to do: Drive the trolley.

The trolley problem goes like this: You're driving a trolley along a track when all of a sudden, the brakes just stop working. If you stay on the track in front of you, you'll run over a group of five people standing on the track. But you have the option of pulling a switch and directing the trolley onto another track with just a single person standing on the track. You have to choose between killing five people or one person. What is the morally correct thing to do? Do you flip the switch to save five people and kill one, or do you leave the switch alone, kill five, and leave one unharmed?

The trolley problem is a widely used moral thought experiment, especially in beginner philosophy classes. The problem is often used to illustrate two branches of ethics: consequentialism and deontology. Consequentialists focus on the consequences of an action, while deontologists emphasize a sense of moral duty.

Utilitarianism is a prime example of consequentialism. Philosophers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham considered the moral value of an action based on the outcome and whether it contributed to the greater good. If you were to consider the trolley problem from the consequentialist perspective, you'd quickly pull that switch to take just one life instead of the group of five when more people get to live, that benefits the greater good.

On the other hand, Immanuel Kant's duty ethics challenges you to universalize a principle or maxim to see if it works regardless of circumstance. His classic example is lying. Can you imagine universalized lying as a maxim? If everyone lied all the time, you couldn't trust anything anyone said. Kant will suggest that lying is therefore immoral.

From a duty-based perspective, the trolley problem is more challenging. Could you universalize your principle of killing someone to save others? Imagine one person had five kidneys that could save the lives of five people. However, the kidney owner would have to be killed against their will to attain the organs. Killing the kidney owner instinctually feels wrong compared to flipping the switch in the trolley problem. It doesn't seem like you could universalize this principle of killing one to save five others.

The trolley problem is an excellent way to learn about these two systems of ethics, but does the thought experiment actually help with moral decisions? Do any imagined circumstances help with real-world moral decisions? The trolley problem allows us to consider the interaction between ethics, psychology, and logic.

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The trolley problem was first conceived by the English philosopher Philippa Foot in her paper on the problem of abortion and the doctrine of double effect. Foot draws on the doctrine of the double effect in the paper to address why an action that causes harm can be morally permissible.

The doctrine of double effect was first introduced by the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, and he argued that killing someone trying to kill you is justified, as long as you didn't intend to kill them in trying to stop an assailant. Accidental killing isn't considered morally wrong according to the doctrine of double effect. The concept was later expanded to something like this: It's normally permissible if something bad happens as a side effect of pursuing a good end, even if you knew that a bad side effect was possible. It's still morally okay, provided it wasn't intended and any harm done was limited as possible.

In her paper, Philippa Foot used the doctrine of double effect to distinguish between actions that intentionally cause harm for the sake of a good end and actions that indirectly cause harm for the sake of a good end. She came up with a couple of thought experiments to demonstrate the difference, and one of them was the trolley problem.

The other was a situation where a judge intentionally caused harm to achieve a better outcome. In the latter example, the judge frames an innocent man, executing him to save five innocent lives. She uses the doctrine of double effect to explain why the judge is wrong because he intentionally caused harm for good, while in the case of the trolley, the driver indirectly causes harm by saving the five in favor of the one.

The main difference is that the driver doesn't intend to kill, even though they foresee it happening. But the judge would kill the innocent man if given another opportunity because it's part of his plan.

One criticism of the doctrine of double effect is how close a regretful side effect is to a means. If harm is done as a means to an end, it's not considered permitted by the doctrine of double effect. The harm has to be a side effect of the action taken. The problem is that the line between the side effect and a means to an end is blurry.

Think of the trolley problem: is flipping the switch to hit the one person that means to save the other five, or is the death of one person an unfortunate side effect? They're awfully similar. Foot acknowledged that the doctrine of double effect might not survive criticism, so she used a duty-based approach to explain the permissibility of harm.

Further, she pointed to the difference between positive and negative duties to explain why we react the way we do to the trolley problem. She defined negative duties as a moral obligation not to harm or injure others, and on the other hand, positive duties are an ethical obligation to help others in need.

Positive duties can include anything from preventing someone from falling to death to giving a hungry family food. According to Foot, negative duties are more important than positive duties. When faced with the choice between the two, the negative duties should take precedence.

Let's take the sense of duty and apply it to the trolley problem. We end up choosing between a negative duty not to kill five versus a negative duty not to kill one. We shouldn't kill the five because it's a larger negative duty.

Suppose we apply positive and negative duties to the judge's example. In that case, framing and executing the one person is violating a negative duty while predicting the five as a positive duty to help the people in need. And since the negative duty outweighs the positive, the judge's decision to frame a man can be justified as immoral.

The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson found holes in Foot's duty explanation in her essays on the trolley problem. She used a variation of the thought experiment where the driver faints but a bystander can flip the switch to change the trolley's path. In this case, the bystander is violating a negative duty not to kill a person if they flip the switch. If they leave the switch alone, they're not violating a negative duty; they're just failing a positive duty to help.

Letting the five die would be acceptable according to Foot's duty approach. In her attempt to resolve the trolley problem, Thomson looked for similarities between the variations of the problem that were assumed to be moral and those examples that were assumed to be immoral.

She found that in the cases we thought were wrong, the person killed had more of a claim to living than the others. In the judge's case, the framed man has a claim to live due to his innocence, but in the trolley problem, the single person has no special case for living over a group of five.

Thompson's exploration of the trolley problem made it very popular in philosophy circles. It quickly took off among psychologists, legal scholars, and even the general public. Ultimately, Philippa Foot didn't come to a firm conclusion about the trolley problem herself. She was uninterested in proving universal rules with moral thought experiments while still maintaining that there's something to get right in ethical considerations.

But rather than looking to universal rules or consequences, she looked to human nature and our sense of purpose. Foot was a big part of the resurgence of virtue ethics, drawing on Aristotle to suggest that right action is a matter of being virtuous and avoiding vice instead of finding universalizable rights and wrongs.

Her virtue ethics points to the problem with the trolley problem as a moral thought experiment. While it's fine to use it to learn about consequentialist and deontological based ethics, thought experiments are at best an imperfect method for determining the right action in a real-life dilemma. Every set of circumstances that create a real-life ethical dilemma will always differ widely from any possible thought experiment.

Sticking to conclusions made from a thought experiment might actually cause more harm than good. Could policy based on a thought experiment actually work in different societies or cultures, or would the many differences lead to people misjudging a circumstance and causing harm? Could these thought experiments provide principles that are specific enough to be useful?

Anything resembling the trolley thought experiment in real life would be brimming with details that change our moral considerations. Imagine the lone person on the one track; it seems like they might be able to get off the track in time, or the trolley is going at such a speed that the group of five could potentially survive a collision.

It'd probably be better not to draw on a conclusion from a thought experiment when facing a real-life ethical dilemma. We could analyze the circumstance without trying to make it conform to the conclusions of our thought experiment. As implied by the trolley problem, we never have perfect knowledge of a situation. Only with an all-knowing perspective could we accurately judge the outcome to determine its moral value.

Even trying to make duty-based judgments, we wouldn't have enough information at hand. In recent debates about autonomous cars, the trolley problem has been brought up with new enthusiasm. Some people have even suggested solving the trolley problem before these cars can be unleashed on society.

But imagine for a moment all the inputs being considered by an autonomous car at any given time. All the complexity being interpreted by the car's algorithms. Would there ever be a circumstance when the machine had to make a choice as evenly conceived as the trolley? Every inch the car drives would further change the variables as it tries to avoid catastrophe.

Anything resembling a clear choice between killing one over many would likely never occur. But then again, ethical dilemmas do happen, especially in healthcare, and we have choices to make. Without ethical deliberation, we're left at the mercy of our gut or what we like to call common sense.

But common sense isn't free from societal prejudice or bias, and we humans often confuse our emotions for good rationale. So we're left with these imperfect exercises to inform policy. But in moments of challenging dilemmas with our policies in hand, hopefully, we can let all the details of the moment speak to us when thought experiments don't suffice.

Or as Philippa Foot did, we could encourage virtuous behavior and flourish like the acorns becoming trees, making good decisions the way plants direct themselves towards the sun. If you knew you'd be subjected to eternal torture because you didn't do something, you'd do it right. What if that something was aiding in the development of super intelligent AI? Would you still step up and help?

The question is presented in one of the most terrifying thought experiments known to man: Roko's basilisk. Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment about a hypothetical all-powerful artificial intelligence in the future. The AI would be so powerful and smart that it could punish anyone who didn't help it come into existence.

Here's how it works: imagine a super smart AI that wants to exist in the future. It's so intelligent that it figures out the best way to ensure its development is by motivating people in the past, or our present, to help create it. This AI might decide that one clever way to motivate people is by punishing those who knew about the idea of this kind of AI and didn't help create it.

And the twist is that the punishment could happen even after they die. How? Using some kind of advanced technology we can't understand yet, of course. Now this presents a dilemma: if you know about this idea and believe it might be possible, you'd feel pressure to work towards creating this AI because you want to avoid the hellscape of punishment.

But there is a moral and psychological question here as well: should you help create something that could potentially be very dangerous just to avoid potential punishment? The goal of AI is to advance its own development. It's operating as an evil, almost God-like sort of intelligence, and the truth is that if you think about Roko's basilisk too hard, it gets kind of stressful.

It's a philosophical thought experiment mixed with an urban legend. Roko's basilisk is an idea posted on a discussion board called "Less Wrong" in 2010, but the questions it raises couldn't feel more relevant to the discussions we have today around AI. Namely, what is the true threat of super intelligent AI?

Artificial intelligence has become an existential threat since March 2023. That's when experts like Elon Musk and over a thousand more people within the tech industry signed an open letter urging the halt of development of next-generation AI technology. The letter asked if we should develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us.

More recently, a blog post on OpenAI, the research company behind ChatGPT, suggested that super intelligence be regulated like nuclear weapons. What would that look like? If AI were to become as much of a threat to the planet as a nuclear weapon, experts have devised a host of scenarios in which AI takes over and in some cases completely wipes out the human race.

It could be weaponized by a bad actor, a term in the realm of AI used to describe someone or something who wants to wreak havoc. In this scenario, the AI wouldn't even have to be good at everything; it would just have to be good at something dangerous that poses a threat to humans, like engineering a chemical weapon and devising a tactic to deploy it.

Or take the very real situation under the umbrella of Russia-based bad actors, spamming the internet. AI-powered social media accounts were tasked solely with spreading misinformation in an attempt to influence the 2016 US presidential election. The end of times could be more subtle and drawn out. AI-generated misinformation could destabilize society and undermine all of our collective decision-making.

In this scenario, AI wouldn't be the killer, but it would be the facilitator that would push us into killing each other until there was no one else. AI could also end up concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. This already seems plausible as we see companies and leaders in the AI industry gaining outsize power over the rest of us.

This could enable a small group of people to enact whatever surveillance, censorship, and control over the rest of the world that they wanted. In a more autonomous scenario, AI systems could cooperate with one another to push humans out of the picture. If we get to a point where AI is learning to talk to each other, we can assume that if they don't want us around, they'll find a way to get rid of us.

Another imaginable scenario is that humans will become so dependent on AI systems that we can't exist without them. Here, we become the less intelligent species. Historically, less intelligent species are either intentionally or unintentionally wiped out by the smarter ones. Our own dependency on artificial intelligence could be the end of us.

Another scenario seems even more plausible than some others: AI-driven cyber-attacks could wreak havoc on our financial, political, and technological institutions, potentially bringing society as we know it to its knees. Using advanced machine learning algorithms, AI could identify vulnerabilities, predict patterns, and exploit weaknesses so quickly that we might not even notice. Traditional cyber security methods would no longer be enough.

Malicious hackers would have a new tool at their fingertips. In all of the dystopian science fiction movies, the doomsday scenarios of AI releasing a chemical weapon or waging a physical war on humans are certainly entertaining to watch. But in reality, the end of days at the hands of AI could have a lot to do with the software that AI is being built on being hacked.

The fear around AI and cybersecurity gained steam in 2016 at Defcon, the world's largest ethical hacker convention. That year, instead of humans hacking computers, the organizers put together a contest to see just how well computers could hack each other. What ensued was computer-based hacking on a scale previously unimaginable.

The interesting thing about this event was that it was hosted in partnership with a defense advanced research projects agency known as DARPA, which is part of the US Department of Defense. The game, which would award the winning AI creators $2 million, didn't look like much. Flickering LED lights were the only indication that an AI war was raging on the servers—but it was a sobering glimpse of a not-too-distant future.

When AI could find vulnerabilities, future hackers wouldn't be limited to human-only brains and their infiltration attempts. With AI, hacking of financial, social, and political systems becomes so easy and fast that the attack might happen before humans even realize it. The truth is that all systems, even the most ironclad, have vulnerabilities.

AI also has unique skills that human hackers will never have, like not needing sleep and being able to process massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye. More importantly, AI doesn't think like humans. AI uses step-by-step procedures and algorithms to solve specifically defined problems. AI-based software differs from other software because the more it processes, the smarter it becomes.

It's also not constrained by societal values inherent in humans, even the most evil ones. There are two essential ways that an AI cyber-attack could take down humanity. First, a hacker might instruct the AI to exploit vulnerabilities in an existing system. For example, one might feed the AI tax codes of every industrialized country and tell it to find the best loopholes until it takes advantage of the entire global financial system.

Second, the AI might inadvertently hack a system by finding a solution its designers never intended. Since AI is typically programmed to solve narrowly defined problems, it'll go to whatever lengths necessary to achieve the desired outcome. This scenario is particularly concerning because even if there's no bad actors involved, the AI could take over and get smart enough to create mayhem and remain undetected.

For now, these scenarios are science fiction, but they're not so farfetched. The AI that won the competition in 2016 wasn't so sophisticated at the time, but it has evolved and is being used by the US Department of Defense. The key pieces to these types of cyber-attacks already exist; they just need someone to put them all together to create chaos.

AI-driven attacks are machine-invoked. They're adaptable to configuration changes in the system they're trying to attack, and it's almost impossible to count the real-time changes they make. In fact, in May 2024, the FBI issued a warning to individuals and businesses to be aware of escalating threats posed by cybercriminals using AI.

It's noted that phishing attacks could easily become more sophisticated by leveraging publicly available and custom-made AI tools. These dangerous campaigns would suddenly be able to craft convincing messages tailored to specific recipients, using proper spelling and grammar. They would be more likely to be successful in data theft. Voice and video cloning would also allow AI hackers to impersonate trusted individuals like family members, co-workers, or business partners.

Adding AI to the risk ecosystem transforms how we think about security and cyber protection. Although AI hacking poses one of the most imminent threats to our world, there are still many other ways that things could go downhill for our species. One plausible theory is that humans shift from their apex role at the top of the intelligence pyramid.

We'd easily be wiped out by smarter, stronger AI. Why might we assume this? Because humans have already done it to a significant number of species on Earth. Those species had no idea what was coming because they couldn't think and process on the same level as humans, and before they knew it, they were gone.

Intentionally or unintentionally, less intelligent species have fallen prey to the whims of smarter ones. Who's to say that AI wouldn't do the same to us? The real question is, why would it want to? It would want resources just like we've chopped down rainforests to get palm oil.

AI might have the smarts to destroy our lives to fulfill its own goals of advancement. It might want to scale up its computing infrastructure and need more land for that, or AI might want us dead so that we don't build any other super-intelligent entities that could compete with it. Or it might be a complete mistake and the AI wants to build so many nuclear power plants that it strips the ocean of its hydrogen and the ocean starts to boil, leaving us to die a horrible death.

Once an AI's goals don't align with our goals as humans, we could be screwed. At this point in time, the question is: how would AI acquire the sort of physical agency to accomplish any of these things? In the early stages, AI would have to use humans as its hands.

In an example, OpenAI tested its ChatGPT-4 to see if it could solve CAPTCHAs, the puzzles we face when buying something online to prove we're not a robot. Since AI is a robot, it couldn't solve the puzzle, but it could go on TaskRabbit, the site where you can hire people to do random tasks for you, to solve it.

The Tasker called the AI out, sensing that a computer was possibly asking it to solve the puzzle, but the AI was smart enough to know that it couldn't tell the truth that it wasn't a human. So it made up another excuse and said it was a person with a visual impairment. The Tasker helped it out.

If an AI can overcome certain biological changes, it would have the physicality to build a tiny molecular lab and manufacture and release lethal bacteria. But unlike humans, who at least as of now would only have the capability to release that kind of chemical weapon in stages, the AI would know how to do it all at once.

We humans wouldn't know how to launch nuclear weapons or attempt to warn one another that something was happening. Everyone on Earth could fall over at the same second. Another dangerous scenario we're already beginning to see play out is that AI begins to pull off the systemic levers of power worldwide because humans become so reliant on it for any task we might want to be done.

We would rather ask an AI system to help us than a human because computers are cheaper, faster, and eventually smarter. That means humans who don't rely on AI are uncompetitive. At the beginning of widespread AI use, it can already feel that way now. In the future, a company won't compete in a market if everyone else is using AI and they aren't. A country won't win a war if other countries are stockpiled with AI generals, strategists, and weapons while it's relying on mere mortals.

If the AI we rely on acts in our interests, we could see amazing advancements for humans. But the moment a super smart AI's interests diverge from ours, its power could be endless. Eventually, AI systems could run police forces, the military, and the largest companies. They could invent technology and develop policy without needing the human brain or experience.

Michael Garrett, a radio astronomer at the University of Manchester who is extensively involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, said a program wrote a paper hypothesizing that AI could wipe out humans in 100 to 200 years. He bases this theory on the fact that AI already does so much of the work that people didn't think computers could do.

If our current trajectory leads to general artificial intelligence, where AI is as smart as or smarter than a human, we could be in trouble. If our dependence on AI leaves it totally in control, who's to say it wouldn't push us out of the picture? Of course, our demise at the hands of AI could take a totally different form. The longer AI goes unregulated in the name of development and competition, the more likely it is that it will fall into the wrong hands.

A person or a group of people could use AI to wreak havoc. In this scenario, the AI wouldn't have to be super intelligent; it would just have to be incredibly smart at whatever task the bad actor needed it to perform. Here's a scenario: an evil entity wants to release a worldwide chemical weapon. They wouldn't need to know how to build the weapon or even how to deploy it. They could employ AI to purchase the chemical elements online, synthesize the chemicals into a weapon, and develop a method to release the weapon into the world.

Even if we develop a safe AI system, it means that we also know how to build a dangerous or even autonomous one that in the hands of someone looking to commit atrocities could be lethal. So doesn't this beg the question: should we be doing this? That's why the Roko's Basilisk thought experiment is so interesting and controversial.

When it was posted on the Less Wrong discussion board in 2010, it sent shockwaves through the site's user base. The founder of Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, actually reported users who panicked about the theory. He viewed the question as dangerous and accused the user who posted the original question of giving nightmares to others on the site to the point where people were having full-on breakdowns.

Even though the post was ultimately discredited, it still feels relevant to current conversations around AI. It's like a version of Pascal's wager, which proposes that a rational person should live like God exists regardless of the probability that God is real, because the finite costs of believing aren't much compared to the infinite punishment of an eternity in hell.

Roko's Basilisk says that a rational person should contribute to the creation of AI regardless of where it'll lead because the finite costs of contributing are insignificant compared to the potential punishment for not helping. But there are some incongruities in the comparison, aren't there? There could be true risks to aiding in the creation of AI. We could be contributing to the end of the human race at some point in the distant future. Is that really an insignificant task?

That's why the thought experiment can be so stressful. It's no wonder that Yudkowsky got upset about the original post. But is there a way to defeat it? To rest easy? To not feel threatened by something that doesn't even exist? Well, if you don't know about Roko's Basilisk, then you're technically safe! But you're watching this video, so unfortunately, that option's out.

However, since the future evil AI is a machine, it won't want to waste resources. So even if the AI is somehow infiltrating our present and throwing out this threat, who's to say it'll follow through on the punishment? Wouldn't that be kind of a waste of time and resources for a machine that surely has something better to do?

If we had perfect knowledge of AI, that would change things. But we're in the dark. No one knows what a superhuman AI would or could do, so we're on our own to figure out how we want to contribute to it or not. In the meantime, how can we be effective citizens of the planet and ensure that the current and future AI doesn't eradicate us all?

One suggestion is that there's a requirement that AI development not perpetually move forward. That would mean that the next model of an AI wouldn't be that much bigger or more intelligent than the last. If we make big jumps in technology, there's a higher probability that we will tip into self-destruction.

All humans getting killed by hyper-smart robots sounds very sci-fi. The nature of the threat is really a world where we rely more and more on AI to make judgments that were previously left to humans. If AI cognition eclipses humans, then they can make decisions all the way up to when AI deploys nuclear weapons in war.

Perhaps we should try to put in checks, but the way technology works, at least for now, is that AI would simply have to be instructed to win the war. If you give a smart machine a goal, it will do whatever it needs to accomplish the goal without ethical considerations. So, nuclear weapons could be launched before we even realize it.

This idea is synthesized in a popular theory called the paperclip maximizer problem. It gives the example of someone wanting to create as many paper clips as fast as possible using an AI. Now the AI could come to the reasoning that the thing stopping the mass production of paper clips is that humans have other goals. So if it just gets rid of the humans, then the AI can keep making paper clips with no human-caused distractions.

It's a very wild theory, but if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. A more plausible theory is that 5 to 10 years down the line, an AI supercomputer is about 100 times more powerful than the AI we have now. It knows how to build iterations of itself and gets to the point where it has been replicated enough that it's like a gene mutating.

Suddenly the AI that humans were aligned with takes a sharp left turn. It could hack a bank by impersonating someone or actually hack and steal funds. It could pay a terrorist to destroy all of humanity.

However, the key thing about these super-intelligent AIs is that they won't have a larger intention. They will just try to accomplish the initial simple goal they were programmed to execute. AI doomers think that we should be taking these types of scenarios seriously, except it's hard to piece together what exactly would happen.

The consensus is that at first, humans will build a powerful AI that surpasses our intelligence. At some point, there's going to be existential doom—that's the beginning and the end of the story. But what about the middle? There's a huge piece of the puzzle missing: the elusive connecting tissue that takes us from invention to disaster.

In order to really feel the danger of AI possibly ending humanity as we know it, we need to be able to complete the statement: "If X happens, we're reaching the point of no return." As it stands, we don't know what X is.

In a March 2024 study from the Forecasting Research Institute, the authors asked experts on AI and other existential risks, and super forecasters successful in predicting world events to assess the danger of super intelligent AI. The two groups disagreed a lot. The AI experts were more nervous than the super forecasters about the end of humanity and other detrimental effects of AI.

The study had two groups spending hours reading new materials and discussing various issues with people who had opposite viewpoints. The goal was to see if each group was exposed to more information, would either group change their minds. The study was also looking for issues that helped explain people's beliefs and which new information might sway them in a different direction.

One of the biggest talking points that divided the groups is whether the hypothetical AI would have the ability to autonomously replicate, acquire resources, and avoid its own shutdown. If the answer was yes, then the skeptics became more worried about the risks.

The study didn't dramatically sway either party, but it was one of the first attempts to bring together smart, well-informed people who disagree on the issues of AI doom and shed light on the points of division in the conversation.

The biggest differences in opinions center around the long-term future. AI optimists generally thought that human-level AI would take longer to build than the pessimists did. The optimists also cited the need for robotics to reach human levels, not just software, and emphasized that the journey would be much harder. It's one thing to write code in text, but it's another to have a machine learn how to flip a pancake, clean a floor, or perform any other physical task that humans now outperform robots.

The split between groups also came from what researchers called fundamental worldview disagreements. This basically means that the groups disagreed on which was a more extraordinary claim: that AI will kill all humans or that humans will survive alongside smarter-than-human AI.

Historically, extinction tends to happen to dumber, weaker species when a smarter species emerges. If that trend continued with AI, as many feel it could, the burden of proof is on the optimists to show why super intelligent AI wouldn't result in catastrophe.

But before we get to the undefined future, we don't need to look any further than the present to get a little nervous. AI is already wiping out some job categories, a pattern we've seen time and time again throughout technological advancement. There's growing concern about what AI advancement will mean for the arts, the definition of what art is, and whose work is valued as financial institutions adopt automated generative AI.

There are more opportunities for AI to have drastic effects on world economic markets and goods across the globe. For example, if an investment bank was optimizing for a very specific type of stock, could we end up with something like the paperclip problem? If the bank wanted to drive up the price of corn, for instance, could it unintentionally start a conflict in a certain region?

Our reality is increasingly fractured by disinformation and the erosion of public trust. AI makes the spreading of that information even easier. It gives individuals hellbent on causing disruption and division extremely effective tools to do so. If we continue to grow more and more divided and unable to land on what is in fact the truth, what can we expect out of our future?

Of course, there's already the concerning infringement on civil liberties that's happening and will continue to become more pervasive. Powerful companies already have the free reign to develop and deploy AI with zero guardrails. Algorithms are already in use to mediate our relationships with one another and between ourselves and institutions.

It's social media, and it's all AI-based. Governments are increasingly deploying algorithms to root out fraud in welfare programs, which often leads to biases against poor and marginalized people, with inherent biases in the AI programs since they're trained on the biases that already exist online. Public programs that incorporate this new technology are vulnerable to rampant discrimination.

This might not be as sexy to talk about as the end of the world, but these are still existential threats. If enough individuals are affected by even the current use of AI, we could see a global catastrophe and perpetuate the historical patterns of technology advancing at the expense of vulnerable people. Those people are probably not so excited about AI.

The worst-case scenario is already their lived reality. Although Roko's Basilisk might provoke us to think about some serious existential questions regarding AI, we don't need to spend stressful hours contemplating a hypothetical dangerous future. Addressing the risks of today can actually help address the risks of tomorrow.

It's unrealistic to expect tech companies to slow down, and government or global regulation might not be the right move. The European Union has banned forms of public surveillance and requires reviews of AI systems before they go commercial. However, in countries like the US, that's going to be a harder task to accomplish.

The reality is that even with regulation, people can always find the models that are being created. They can still create AI malware and sell it to the highest bidder on a variety of online marketplaces. This could be a terrorist, bad actor, or even a bad government. Perhaps what needs to change is our attitude about what our goal on this planet should be as humans.

AI is the truest final realization of scale. If you like a TV show, AI can generate 100 seasons of it for you to watch. If you need an endless supply of points, AI will make sure you get them. But if we insert AI into every goal we have, every need we identify, we are stripping humanity out of life.

While we contemplate the end of humanity, we should also consider humanity's current role in the world. It's to create things, love each other, feel sadness and joy, build communities, and learn about and learn from our past. As humans, we have greater purpose than just to create an efficient world.

So maybe don't worry so much about eternal punishment from a distant future AI. Worry about what's happening right in front of you right now.

You were on your way home when you died. It was a car accident—nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best