alt Hacker NewsThe Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality. I agree a lot of "nice" futures with AI will look like that, but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice". I don't see a path from AIs built for profit and national defense to a Culture-like future or any "nice" future at all. Or rather, there could be such a path but it would require AIs to be built for public interest already now.
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> but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice".
How do you know that?
> The Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality.
The difference is that there's no need to build AIs with "motivation". Computers don't view us as anything right now, even if they're better at working with bits than us. What would change this in your mind?
Naturally, we will anyway because that's a short-cut and we're not very imaginative. But any kind of AI that would want anything will have to be explicitly built by us.
AM for example could plausibly be trained on 4chan and war footage.
Is there any optimistic sci-fi that doesn't have something like superpowerful perfect AI?
It feels like such a thing is a bit of a cop-out as it removes all the problems that arise from human imperfections and yet our own history is that of an improving standard of living despite these imperfections.