Elon Musk’s AI predictions should terrify us

How will AI destroy humanity? Will it simply go house to house in robot form, slaughtering us where it finds us? Or will it instead discover that a certain property of our livers or spleens is the most cost-effective form of lubrication for one of its less important robotic joints, and harvest us for that property, as we now harvest chickens, in battery farms? It’s a fun thought experiment, no?

Perhaps it will find us entertaining, in the same way we find the base animals with whom we share the planet entertaining – my children’s hamster, for example, which for their enjoyment in the evenings I allow to gambol in our sitting room inside a little plastic ball. On that basis, it may let us live out our days in relative peace.

Equally possible, I suppose, is that it will quite reasonably deduce humans can be made to work incredibly hard for nothing more than the avoidance of terrific pain – in a way that machines simply won’t be made to work.