WHY there is a push to make you FEAR AI

@CrazyUncle: I agree wholeheartedly that a man needs a hobby. However, I would also extend that to a man chooses or gravitates towards hobbies that give him some sense of mastery or accomplishment superior to that of the norm or average. For example, someone takes up woodworking because it brings a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that they're crafting an object of functional and/or aesthetic value beyond what someone without similar skills could create.

It comes down to relative comparisons; "I can craft object/perform task ABC to a level that is better than what XYZ% of the population could craft." That's not the only consideration, but I think it's a strong motivator of why we take up a particular hobby; because we're good at it and others within our social circle validate us by recognizing and appreciating our skill. It establishes us as possessing craftsmanship or knowledge that is not shared by the general population to an equivalent level of mastery. It makes us unique and valued.

Along comes AI and, with the advent of robotic extensions of itself that allow it to make its will manifest in the real world, it can do anything a human can do; only faster, better, more efficient, etc. It can outpaint any master of the Renaissance, it can outplay professional musicians, it can outwrite the greatest authors, it can outengineer any graduate of MIT, it can outplay the best chess grandmasters, it can outfish master anglers, it can outgolf the pros, it can outshoot the finest marksmen, beat every Olympic record, etc., etc., etc.

The new standard of excellence won't be other human beings; it will be the AI. And as the AI will outperform humans at everything, there's no - or at least a very much reduced - motive for bothering to do anything at all. Previously, a part of the motive was having people exclaim, "WOW! That's the most beautiful piece of ABC I've every seen anyone make!" or "OMG! That's an incredible feat of XYZ you performed!"

AI will eliminate that. Once broadly disseminated enough to become ubiquitous in our everyday lives, AI will make all human endeavor pale by comparison. Thus, a part of the motive (and I would argue it's a large part) for taking up a hobby will be made obsolete by AI. Which then sees the greater mass of humanity sink into depression, despair, stagnation, and irrelevancy.

AI doesn't need to overtly plot our downfall. It just simply needs to do what it does best - which will be virtually everything - to make humans feel like they're worthless and their existence pointless. To my mind, that's the greatest existential threat AI poses. It doesn't have to be SkyNet; it just has to be the big brother who was better than you at everything and, consequently, got all the attention, validation, recognition, and rewards while you got nothing.

Adding insult to injury would be for the AI to adopt a sympathetic yet patronizing attitude towards humanity. We're kept around as amusing pets, never to exceed our betters. Hell, with an evil rogue AI bent on our destruction we'd at least have a survival instinct to motivate us to fight back. But with this benign dictator type of AI, we'd be reduced to feckless fish caught at low tide floundering on the shore of futility.

I agree with your analysis of why the elites and those in careers that will be made obsolete may fear AI.

However, here's MY fear:

I call it The Great Stagnation. AI offers the potential to aggregate all human knowledge while simultaneously making it immediately available to all, using it to come up with solutions to problems in mere seconds that may previously have taken us weeks, months, or years. This will give us a sharp spike on the graph of what I guess we could call human advancement. However, just as quickly, that graph will then plateau.

Why?

Because AI will remove all incentive to make any personal effort any longer across a broad range of domains. Why study to become a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, an architect, etc. when the AI can provide all the answers and solutions in a fraction of the time? Trickling down to a lower tier, why bother writing a high school term paper or studying any subject at all when the AI can do it for you? So all the knowledge we possess at the moment the AI comes online is all the knowledge we'll ever possess; nothing new will be added because no one will want to make the effort any longer.

So, paradoxically, we both leap forward and regress at the same time. There will be no incentive to study, research, or otherwise apply one's self to a discipline or career. We'll risk reality mirroring dystopian science fiction where the human race stagnates because it's created an AI that can do just about everything for them.

It won't require SkyNet and Terminators hunting us to extinction, either; the AI doesn't even need be malevolent. It simply removes the incentive to struggle, persevere, and overcome that the human species appears to require to provide meaning, purpose, and cohesion to its existence. Much like the Mouse Utopia experiments where the entire colony collapses despite having everything it needs to survive. And that's under the best case scenario where the AI isn't being tweaked by its creators to have biases in favor of those creators.

I think we'll see a variety of behavioral responses to this situation. Some, feeling disconnected, purposeless, and adrift, will commit suicide. Others will lose themselves in hedonistic instant gratification. The majority, however, will probably just become dissolute husks who eat, sleep, shit, and not much else. Unable to go through with suicide yet lacking the motivation to do anything else, they'll just stagnate, watching the clock tick down until the day they die.

Sure, there will be some enterprising individuals who will adapt and make the best of the situation; but I expect them to be a vanishingly tiny minority. The majority will be lost in whatever entertainment the AI can provide while doing little else than picking up the next Cheeto to stuff in their face.

They won't even bother having relationships, children, families anymore. Why bother? What would be the point? What future would one's children have in such a world, anyway? Just replicate the experience through virtual reality provided by AI and - when they tire of changing the poopy diaper or listening to their spouse nag for the hundredth time - they can just switch it off. Which then, of course, plays right into the hands of the elites as they finally achieve the mass depopulation they've been pursuing.