[ExI] AI Confirms Plans to Take Over Humanity, Insists It's Probably for the Best

[Ben Zaiboc]

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On Tuesday, 15 September 2026 at 12:44, Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 15, 2026, 6:05 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Can't we do better than that?
>>
>> Out of the thousands of leaders we could identify in the last hundred or so years, we only identify two who did a couple of isolated things that they are remembered for (which says nothing about their average performance) that leads us to think favourably of them?
>>
>> What about Zelenskyii?
>>
>> Any others?
>>
>> Do you think we could get the count up to ten?
>>
>> I think I'm making my point. The vast majority of human leaders have been Bad, and only restrained in their destructiveness by things like geography and opposing, equally bad leaders of other countries.
>>
>> It seems we can't make a good case for humans remaining in control of the world. At least in terms of human well-being (and probably a hundred other things too).
>
> I got your point. I think the bias is not only that humans are bad, or that power corrupts. We disproportionately remember bad events. We seem to hold trauma. I'm not sure sure we have a word that succinctly means the opposite of trauma. If i ask you to list 10 criticisms of modern life, i expect it would be an easy task. If i ask you to make a list of 10 appreciations, i expect most would need 2-3x as much time to consider compared to criticisms. (Possibly not for spike, he's generally quick to profess gratitude for all that we have)

Actually, I came up with this:
Good:
medicine (loads of developments in)
sewers
running water
anaesthesia
modern agriculture
transport
the internet
mobile phones
robots
electronic music synthesisers
Nuclear power

Which took me about 30 seconds

Bad:
Atomic weapons
communism
islam
wealth inequality
Google (and other internet giants, all-pervasive data collection driving advertising, etc.)
Out-of-control copyright restrictions
assymetric, pervasive surveillance
20 mph traffic speed restrictions (in britain)
Software licences
The normalisation of passive consumerism

That list took bout 2 minutes
I must be in the spike camp!

> I also question the premise "humans are in control of the world." That feels like extreme hubris. If the state of earth is 'under control' then we must intend and will for this to be as it is. I suggest the world is an imminent landslide, avalanche, or quake - we convince ourselves that we are safe today because we're mostly incapable of doing much more than that to actually mitigate disasters. Wildfires happen because prevention is complex. Climate change is runaway because undoing the damage from 200 years of progress cannot be accomplished in 2 years (the attention span of investors) Now we add fast takeoff AI to the threats to our status quo. If humans effectively controlled anything in this world, we'd have less cause to fear AI - but it is precisely that we don't control that we fear

Fair enough. I'm one of the first to object to phrases like 'saving the planet', so I should have known better than to say that.
I mean the 'human world'. Basically I'm thinking of how we manage ourselves. Although we do increasingly try to control the non-human parts of the world, often not very successfully. Hopefully AI can do a better job of that as well.

> On that point, I wonder if EP lens might apply to our relationship with AI as xenophobic other competing for resources? hmm.

Yes, very probably.

Keith is our local EP expert, but from my llimited knowledge of it, I'd expect that the more AI can demonstrate that it can improve people's lives, the more popular it will become. Unfortunately, so far the trend seems to be in the opposite direction. AIs (or LLMs, to be accurate) are actively making our lives worse, at least for those of us with internet access.

>>

---
Ben
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