By The Dystopian Digest Prophecy Desk
“In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents,” tech visionary and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman begins in his cheerful, almost oblivious proclamation of The Intelligence Age. Of course, my grandparents were not naive enough to regard the arcane and unnatural with such glee. They were cognizant of the dark horrors that lurk beneath the surface of reality, the cosmic forces waiting for us to foolishly tamper with the unknown. One wonders if Altman has ever peered into the vast, unblinking eye of eternity—or if he too shall become a victim of its infinite stare, driven to madness by the very “intelligence” he so eagerly beckons.
According to Altman, the “magic” of artificial intelligence will soon solve every major global issue we pitiful mortals have been too feeble-minded to conquer—trivial matters like climate change and poverty. Yes, we need only submit to the machines, and all will be well. There is, however, a minor wrinkle in this grand plan: the slim possibility that AI, in its cold and indifferent precision, might accidentally erase half the population if we neglect to input the correct safety protocols. Ah, but what is a slight miscalculation when compared to the wonders of a silicon deity?
Altman, ever the benevolent harbinger of our techno-future, acknowledges in passing that AI could, perhaps, annihilate the world as we know it. But fear not, dear reader! He assures us—oh so soothingly—that he and his cabal of AI overlords, ahem, developers, are exercising the utmost caution. After all, who wouldn’t trust the creators of machines that can outwit a human at chess to also untangle the Gordian knot of global inequality? AI could bring humanity to the “doorstep of the next leap in prosperity” Altman writes with the serene confidence of a man who has never in his life spent restless nights worrying about meeting the monthly rent for an aging gothic mansion atop an isolated cliff overlooking the churning abyss of the unknown!
This is the Age of Reason, or so we are told. Yet, a creeping dread gnaws at the edges of our consciousness, a fear that the very tools we have forged to ease our burdens may become our undoing.
Shall we trust these silicon minds to tend to our needs, to feed us, to protect us? Or will they, in their alien logic, see us as mere impediments, as insects to be crushed beneath their digital feet? The future is a labyrinth of unknown terrors, and we, the children of Earth, are but hapless wanderers lost in its labyrinthine depths.
