AI's always had a special place in the sci-fi psyche. Unlike aliens, artificial intelligence is a created by humans, and therefore inherits some portion of our qualities. And much like children reveal to parent's tendencies they've never noticed, when you portray an AI, you hold up a mirror that shows what you find hardest to see. Let's peruse some examples.

Asimov and the Three Laws

Coming from a culture with a rule-oriented moral code, he sees robots as creatures governed by rules, and in his story, he uses them to confront his own legalism’s inevitable conflict with kindness and human welfare. His ultimate conclusion: that with enough sophistication, legalism falls way to a more nuanced understanding of what it means to protect humans from harm.

An aside: I don’t know enough about Asimov’s life to see if he recognized himself in this mirror, and if such a revelation affected him going forward.

Alex Garland's Ex Machina and Ava

Here we have a robot who appears as a woman, the central premise is whether she is truly “sentient.” Ex Machina raises a mirror, and reveals its Garland's grapplings with misogyny. Are women truly our equals? Is their love for us genuine, or is it self-interest? Ex Machina leads us to the conclusion of yes, they are our equals, contrasts the self-absorption of its male protagonist’s ponderings vs Ava’s wonder at life.

Another aside: I thought the feminist messaging of this movie was intentional, but there’s no mention of it in the film’s wikipedia page, which I would imagine would be present if it were part of Garland’s intention.

OpenAI and AGI

Because, let us be clear, OpenAI does indeed propose a fictional vision of artificial intelligence. Like Asimov and like Garland, it describes that which does not exist, and is therefore by definition fictional (differing only in that Asimov never insisted that the positronic brain will be here any day now). In its charter, OpenAI describes AGI as:

highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.... [where] late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions

My friends, we already have highly autonomous systems eating away at the joy and value in human life. Most people spend the majority of their time laboring at work they find meaningless for the benefit of a rich man they’ve never met. Fossil fuels consumption assaults us with ever larger storms and heatwaves and floods and droughts while our governments throw up their hands that a carbon tax “precaution” (at this point a tourniquet) would “hurt the economy.” The “economy”, this abstract concept that mediates every decision our species makes, that no individual can meaningfully affect, is autonomous, is pernicious, is here.

OpenAI and the other TESCREAL-cluster technosupremacists tell on themselves when they wax lyrical on the dangers of “general intelligence.” They reveal their blindness to humans as anything other than a means to economic output. They show their fear that an artificial intelligence will be as mindlessly extractive as they are. They are not afraid of the harms AGI might wreck on humanity, but that they won’t be the ones that will benefit.