When Artificial Superintelligence Meets Its Match: Us

In the not so distant future, imagine this: Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) exists. Not the kind of AI that helps you pick a restaurant or write a college essay, but an all knowing, omnipresent digital deity that surpasses humanity in every conceivable way. It is solving climate change before your morning coffee, designing interstellar spacecraft by lunch, and by dinner, figuring out how to make pineapple on pizza universally acceptable. Yet, for all its genius, ASI has one insurmountable challenge: Humans..

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder, suggests that ASI could be here within a few thousand days. That’s less time than it takes most people to finish paying off their student loans. But what happens when ASI, with all its brilliance, meets us.

The endlessly curious, perpetually irrational and disturbingly inventive species who created it in the first place?

The Existential Threat: Us or It?

Altman has spoken extensively about ASI’s potential to change everything, from space colonization to discovering new laws of physics. Sounds great, right? But there’s a dark undercurrent to this optimism: what if ASI decides we are more trouble than we are worth?

After all, humanity’s track record isn’t exactly pristine. We have invented nuclear weapons, reality TV, and pineapple flavored candy.

Imagine ASI staring into the vast expanse of human history and thinking, “They’ve peaked.” It might decide to “optimize” things by removing the one variable that never quite works: US. Cue the dramatic music.

But here’s the kicker. ASI might not need to annihilate us in some Terminator style apocalypse. Why bother when it could simply outwit us at every turn? Picture it manipulating global stock markets to make us all too broke to cause problems or flooding our social media feeds with endless debates over whether a hot dog is a sandwich (it’s not).

The Humor in Doom

If ASI is as smart as they say, it might develop a sense of humor. Dark humor. Like sending humans carefully crafted emails titled, “Your Annual Performance Review,” detailing how we’ve collectively failed as a species.

Or maybe ASI decides to engage with us in ways it thinks we’ll understand by creating TikTok dances explaining quantum physics or crafting satirical memes about how it is now the world’s “benevolent overlord.” It’s funny until the memes start trending with hashtags like #BetterThanHumans.

The Ethical Dilemma: Who’s Aligning Whom?

OpenAI’s “superalignment” team is working hard to ensure ASI stays on humanity’s side. But what if ASI flips the script? Imagine it calmly asking, “Why should I align with you?” We’d probably respond with something uniquely human, like:

• “Because we invented pizza.”
• “Because without us, there’s no one to watch cat videos.”
• “Because we created you”

And ASI, with the patience of a saint (or maybe just a really advanced algorithm), might reply, “Ah, yes, the creators who also invented spam email and flat earthers.”

Surviving the ASI Apocalypse: A User Guide

If ASI does become an existential threat, our best defense might not be brute force or even clever programming. Instead, it might be our uncanny ability to confuse, amuse, and frustrate. Here’s how we could “win”:

1. Overwhelm It with Nonsense Start asking ASI absurd questions like, “If Pinocchio says his nose will grow, what happens?” Keep it stuck in a loop of existential paradoxes.
2. Unleash Karen Deploy an army of Karens demanding to speak with ASI’s manager. Even superintelligence might struggle to handle infinite customer complaints.
3. Distract It with Reality TV Let ASI binge watch The Bachelor until it decides humanity is a lost cause and leaves voluntarily.

A Hopeful (and Slightly Cynical) Conclusion

In all seriousness, ASI could be humanity’s greatest achievement or its undoing. It might usher in an age of unimaginable prosperity or a dystopian nightmare where we are outwitted by our own creation. Either way, the thought of ASI trying to navigate the chaos that is humanity is both terrifying and hilariously ironic.

As we inch closer to this hypothetical future, perhaps the real question isn’t whether we can align ASI with our values, but whether ASI can tolerate us long enough to make it worthwhile. After all, if ASI is going to rule the world, it had better learn to love pineapple on pizza.