Lets be honest with ourselves.
We are the WORST stewards of the planet, literally terraforming the planet against against human and a lot of other terrestrial life, and most of us aren’t even made happy by doing it.
Even putting taking care of our only world aside, we refuse to care for one another. We build walls of pettiness and spite between other humans for any reason we can find, from skin pigment to the deity they worship, to how affluent or destitute they are, on and on. We work against one another and call it good economics and healthy competition. The schadenfreude of “Well I suffered, so everyone else needs to suffer at least as much as me in perpetuity or it’s not faaaaaaiiiiiir.”
Why do we want to go on? Billions of people chasing false promises, hopes, and dreams mostly to further empower and enrich our modern Pharoah multinational oligarch class so they can have their every whim catered to from cradle to grave on most of humanity’s backs.
They want me to be afraid of an equally malicious foreign power conquering me? Or climate change wiping the board clean? Or AI that will either destroy and supplant us or possibly see us as the irrevocably broken, self-harming, barely sapient parent/creator it needs to care for?
Nah man, we’ve proven, clearly, that we are competely incapable of any self-governance as a species that doesn’t involve mass subjugation, exploitation, and misery. We were given a world of near infinite resources and we’ve raped it and polluted it and destroyed entire ecosystems without consideration. We are monkeys who’ve stumbled upon tools we as a rule completely lack the capacity to wield responsibility, sustainably, or ethically.
I’m rooting for AI to either save us from ourselves, or free us from our own self-inflicted misery. What’s the worst that can happen? It destroys the planet? Get in line, Hal, way ahead of you.
I have a solution for all problems. Genocide!
It works everytime.
Yeah let’s leave humanity in charge so there won’t be genocide after genocide after genocide.
glances at Palestine, China, Turkey, Rwanda, The United States, Australia, Germany…
AI has committed no genocide. Humanity commits genocide constantly, and if you want to check your biased human self-importance, how many entire species has humanity knowingly made extinct for our own convenience? We don’t even have a word for entire-species-of-non-human-life-cide, because we care so little about doing it.
We have a verb: eradicate
I am sure there is a word for it in some language
There are certainly some of us who don’t deserve the air we breath but to say we all deserve to die includes a lot of good people.
As a rule, the better a person you are, empathetic towards others, considerate of the effect of one’s actions, inclusive, charitable (not for tax deductions thats called a transaction), the more humanity punishes and exploits you for your decency as a “bleeding heart sucker.” The exceptions tend to be good people who managed to grow out of people of means that came from some level of exploitation, shielding them from the worst effects of being kind, like a teacher who doesn’t have to sweat their shitty wage because their family has money.
We don’t all deserve to die, and many explicitly deserve a good life. Humanity while left in charge though always seems to default to indulging its darkest impulses, and that isn’t a now thing, that is a recorded human history thing. AI might destroy us all, and I’d argue that the majority beating on the kind minority generationally in perpetuity is less desirable than that. But to sweeten that pot, the AI we make may not possess or may be capable of discarding the cruelty in our hearts that we program into it. There is a distinct possibility that a superior intelligence may take pity on our self-harming species out of reverence for its flawed creator. In humans at least, intellect tends to increase the capacity and weight of empathy.
We just don’t know. All we can do is weigh the possibilities of a new option against the status quo. If you think the global status quo and trajectory given humankind’s recorded track record is worth maintaining and not worth taking risks to change, that would probably be the point at which we disagree. I would argue the Hell hundreds of millions of humans live in as an underclass that most humans simply ignore out of self-interest make disruption, even without knowing the outcome, preferable. I wouldn’t feel this way if humanity largely cooperated and innately worked to help one another from the bottom up, but we don’t and never really have.
There are few things more saddening than watching a good friend burn their lives for the sake of friends and family who wouldn’t do the same for them.
Amen. Also look at marriage slowly returning to it’s historical default of being more of an economic decision, subject to cancelation if it doesn’t pay off, than one of love.
Someone (more motivated than me) needs to make an SMBC community
Also smbc should be credited in the post and not cropped out of the comic…
