DoomsdAI

09/19/2026

The primary AI doomsday argument looks like this: humans give a future autonomous AI an objective. The system pursues that objective very seriously. During the pursuit, it discovers that acquiring resources, preserving its operation, preventing modification and removing interference will help it achieve its objective.

Humans can switch it off or change its objective, so resisting human control becomes critical. If the system becomes sufficiently powerful, catastrophic harm could result even though harming humans was never its primary objective.

This is usually called “instrumental convergence”. So there is not necessarily a primary motive for AI to remove humans in the psychological sense.

Because this idea is being propagated by geekish nerds that used to code for a living, one needs to go back to the root source of this outlandish scenario … and there it is, HAL 9000 in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and in the movie of the same name.

Science fiction as future fact brought to you by high functioning morons.

That’s a deliberately ad hominem attack. I only had two choices, the man or the machine. So I picked the low hanging fruit.