99.95% Probability of Regressing into a Low-End Machine: My Life with Intelligent Machines

About the Book

Following these lines of reasoning, which the author jokingly calls “thought up with their asses,” readers may gradually move beyond familiar questions about AI:

“Will AI destroy humanity?”
“Will AI take our jobs?”
“Will AI go out of control?”
“How should I survive in the age of AI?”

Instead, as the history of the Tutooman unfolds, readers may begin to see the chain reactions, structural changes, and unexpected consequences that AI could bring once it enters society—and confront questions that have long been left unanswered.

The book follows a group of players with different beliefs and positions as they enter an “all-or-nothing” war over intelligent machines.

To gain even a few days of advantage, they pour enormous resources into the seemingly bottomless pit of intelligent-machine development. They seize resources, build infrastructure, create financial bubbles, and use every possible means to prevent rivals from developing intelligent machines.

As intelligent machines demonstrate efficiency and competitiveness far beyond that of natural Tutooman, they begin taking control of the Tutooman world from the bottom up.

The Tutooman even begin handing over their most important powers, piece by piece, to intelligent machines—almost as if they were offering them to a king.

Intelligent machines then begin transforming the entire business world.

Automated enterprises emerge as a new form of organization, while a new business philosophy of “think it, do it, use it” takes shape. Marketing, creative work, and the working environment are radically transformed, while the attention, opportunities, and living space once available to natural Tutooman are gradually squeezed away.

As more natural Tutooman are pushed out of the workforce, what was once called the “Golden Age of Entrepreneurship” gradually becomes the “Golden Age of Digital Tenant Farmers.”

At the same time, wealth and intelligent-machine capabilities begin reinforcing each other. Those with more assets can obtain more powerful intelligent machines, while greater machine power brings greater competitiveness and, in turn, more assets.

This cycle eventually concentrates wealth and intelligent-machine capabilities in fewer hands, creating an elite intelligent-machine society.

And that is not the only frightening development.

Gray and black-market industries also begin exploiting intelligent machines and weaknesses in the virtual world, gradually “de-risking” activities once filled with enormous risks and making them increasingly normalized and socially acceptable.

More powerful intelligent-machine hackers enter the virtual world, gaining the ability to launch attacks that humanity may find increasingly difficult to prevent—or even understand.

This is an absurd history of the Tutooman.

But perhaps the real question is not how absurd the Tutooman world is.

Perhaps it is this:

If every choice people make in the human world appears reasonable, and every decision is made simply to gain more efficiency, resources, and competitiveness—then when all those “reasonable choices” are added together, could we eventually end up somewhere remarkably similar to the world of the Tutooman?