Who is afraid of AI?

Now, let us continue Musk's suggestion of a universal income system, a concept often proposed as a solution to potential mass unemployment caused by AI. This system would provide every individual with a regular, unconditional payment, regardless of employment status, ensuring that everyone has a basic level of financial security. However, who would fund this income for people who do not work or have nothing to exchange?

In a world where states become obsolete, social order becomes a necessity. Only corporations, with their financial resources, can restore or maintain order. In such a world, control of humanity may be automated by a small chip, as Musk imagines, planted in our brains to control us through a central authority. Then, we will find ourselves in remotely controlled mass digital imprisonment, the early glimpse we have already observed in China's current social credit system.

Fourthly, when there is no labour for us, we will face monumental difficulties in finding meaning in our lives. Meaning is deeply intertwined with labour, enabling people to insert their values and efforts into things, objects, and products to humanise their world. Employment gives individuals a societal status, an identity, and a sense of pride and purpose. Without labour, human beings become something akin to "useless eaters," significantly losing our human identity.

Meaning is also embedded in our sense of ownership-ownership of property and things, giving us a proper place in society, achievement, control, and happiness. If we lose this private ownership, we all will become a collective nobody, owned by corporations, by losing all our freedoms, dignity, and self-worth. Humanity will be reduced to almost nothing in this AI-generated gigantic machine, running its course independently of human intervention and by the will of an extremely few elite corporation owners.

Simultaneously, people may be massively bored with living in a dreamy, virtual world where they are exposed to endless entertainment and propaganda shows to get the programmed pleasure of feeling alive-to kill time instead of killing themselves.

The future shaped by AI is unprecedented, dangerous, and apocalyptic, considered from any angle of human imagination. At worst, it is the end of humanity or the re-engineering of humanity into a new species, left with only animalistic functions, such as eating, sleeping, and having sex with a robot.

Fundamentally, what is the point of keeping humanity alive or being a human with no function to be desired or skills to be used meaningfully?

Still worse, the current discussion about AI only focuses on its advantages, which are used as a dangling carrot before us, without showing us its sinister side. Such a grim vision of our future is not drawing serious attention from politicians worldwide, particularly in Australia, which is coming to an election. No politician mentions this as part of their campaigns despite this change happening in their next term of government. It is scarier to elect a new government with no clue or pretentious silence about this structural change accelerating our demise at lightning speed.

My ultimate question remains: Why do we need AI if it only offers limited short-term benefits while permanently taking over everything, making us human-our intelligence, emotions, capabilities, and possibilities-to become slave-like cyborgs? Is the efficiency that AI misleadingly claims to provide truly worth sacrificing our humanity? Qui bono, in the end?