"For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings:
'When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.'"
I suspect, in Christian terms, that this would be another case of principalitites and powers only perhaps ratchetted up a notch; it would be easy to get all apocalyptic about it, but I think that we should note the way that emergent 'corporations' [that is, things that grow out of human collectivities that are more than aggregations] have tended to show up, it is not quite at that scale. However, comparisons with De Chardin's noosphere may be worth ruminating more.
Edge: TURING'S CATHEDRAL by George Dyson: AI, world_mind, emergence, noosphere,
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