Where will AI strike first?
Homo sapiens, as a species, is programmed to anticipate death, disaster and apocalypse. The monster in the mere, the ague that comes from the east, the flood that wipes out all living creatures outside the Ark. The reason children – and adults in horror movies – are scared of the dark is because darkness is where predators strike. We have a sensible evolutionary fear of things that go bump in the night. For thousands of years it was possible to argue this primal fear of apocalypse was overwrought. No matter what humans did, or did not do, we were incapable of destroying ourselves and anything that might destroy us in toto – like the comet that erased the dinosaurs – was simultaneously so rare and so beyond our ability to resist that it was pointless worrying.
