Silicon Valley Is Ready for Robots To Kill Us All – Vanity Fair

A couple of years ago, right before the pandemic began, a friend told me an unsettling story of an interaction he had with a tech titan in Silicon Valley. My friend had been invited to a high-end dinner in Palo Alto, with a couple dozen or so tech founders, CEOs, and investors.Its not quite as cabal-like as it sounds: These kinds of elbow-rubbing dinners, often held in the back room of a fancy restaurant, are a regular occurrence in the tech world. At them, invitees (often CEOs, V.C.s, and sometimes tech journalists) might share like-minded ideas or debate some esoteric new technology.

At this particular meal, by chance, my friend wound up sitting next to a multibillionaire tech CEO. Their conversation veered onto the topic of robots and artificial intelligence, a field this tech titan had invested in. The CEO launched into a long explanation of how our future planet will someday, perhaps very soon, be inhabited by millions, if not billions, of robots. They will live among us, walking our dogs, driving our cars, serving and protecting our families, and operating our infrastructure, he predicted. My friend, naturally, was curious what would happen to us humans in that future.

Who is going to program the A.I.? my friend asked.

Well, at first, we will, the tech titan responded. But it wont be long before the A.I. is smarter than us, and it will start to program itself.

What happens if the A.I. and these robots decide they dont need humans anymore?

Then they get rid of us, the tech titan said with a shrug.

My friend was taken aback by this comment. Thats terrifying.

No, its not, the tech titan said, setting down his knife and fork to really focus on the point he wanted to make. If the robots decide to get rid of us, if were no longer necessary on this planet, then thats just the next step in evolution.

There are, of course, plenty of billionaires and tech gurus who have been warning about the existential threat to humanity that A.I. might poseand dont want a future where robots rid the planet of us dumb humans. Jaan Tallinn, one of the cofounders of Skype, recently cautioned that Humanity does not have anything to protect it from the potential risks of artificial intelligence. Elon Musk put his viewpoint in a slightly more alarming way: For an A.I., there would be no death. It would live forever. And then youd have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape, he said. So you can see why, even after hearing the story of the tech titan shrugging off robot overlords as the next step in the evolutionary process, I assumed most people were in the camp of wanting to ensure humanity does, indeed, survive.

The problem is that lately Ive been hearing more and more people talk about this evolution idea when it comes to robots, and its not just one-off conversations with peculiar billionaires. Over the past year, Ive heard (and even participated in a few) variations of this conversation with people in Silicon Valley working in the robotic and general A.I. space who have echoed similar sentiments. While their predictions about timing varysome say 10 years, others 100, a few believe weve got at least a thousand years leftmany of them have started to use that same word when referring to humans potentially being replaced by their robotic overlords: evolution. While this isnt actual biological evolution, as the robot- and A.I.-makers presumably will not carry our genes, its akin to survival of the fittest, where the robots survive, and we dont.

Another CEO who owns a robotics company suggested to me that its almost not worth worrying about the terrifying prospect of robots replacing us for a different reason: Namely, if they dont, well only end up killing ourselves off via some other human-created tragedy. Climate change, overpopulation, a more advanced COVID variant, nuclear war, quantum computing, or biotech manipulation gone awry. Really, the CEO said, were actually ensuring that humanity lives on after were dead by creating a new species modeled after usone that can arguably survive for a lot longer than we can. While there was a tinge of comedy in the way he delivered this prediction, it was clear that he believed it was true.

People in Silicon Valley are correct to point out that its not a question of if humans will eventually die out and be eviscerated from the face of the planet (or the universe), but a question of when. There are the best-case scenarios, where our endand that of our shared ecosystemcomes in millions if not billions of years from now, when the sun grows cold. And there is the grimmest future, unlikely but not impossible, where in a few decades, robots eye our children and wonder if they need them. Were the only species (as far as we know) to invent transistors and computers and communication tools and possibly soon, robots and A.I. If were smart enough to do that, we should probably ask ourselves if what were building could kill us, and maybejust maybewe should start thinking about how to ensure that doesnt happen. These are conversations we need to begin having now, as these technologies are being built, not after the fact, when we can only wish that we had.

A few years ago, Nick Bostrom, who runs the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, a rare philosopher with a background in theoretical physics and artificial intelligence, wrote a paper detailing how humans could find themselves wiped off the face of the planet.He concluded that there are really only two ways the future plays out. The first is that we evolve and transform into one or more new species or life forms, sufficiently different from what came before so as no longer to count as Homo sapiens; the other, by simply dying out, without any meaningful replacement or continuation.

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Silicon Valley Is Ready for Robots To Kill Us All - Vanity Fair