In 2012, I sat down with Hugo de Garis, and he told me billions of people could die this century over one question: should we build machines smarter than ourselves?
Back then, it sounded like pure science fiction. He called the coming conflict the Artilect War. On one side, the Cosmists who want to build godlike machine intelligence. On the other hand, the Terrans who would rather go to war than gamble on human extinction. In between, the Cyborgists who just want to become gods themselves. He even had a word for the body count:
Gigadeath.
Fourteen years later, the war he predicted hasn’t arrived. The question underneath it has moved to the center of the room.
Because de Garis got one thing profoundly right, even if the timeline was lurid. The hard part was never whether we could build these systems. It’s whether we should, and who gets to decide. That is not a #technology question. Technology is only ever the How. This is a Why and a What, a question about power, values, and what kind of species we choose to become.
He was asking it when almost nobody else was. That is why this conversation still holds up.
