We need to be considering a wider range of emotions. Maybe a few decades from now, autonomous AI will be a reality and we’ll have to worry whether it’s servile or inscrutable. Maybe? But that’s not the genre we’re in at the moment. Machine learning is already transforming our world, but the things that should excite and terrify us about the next decade are not even loosely analogous to robots. We should be thinking instead about J. L. Borges’ Library of Babel—a vast labyrinth containing an infinite number of books no eye has ever read. There are whole alternate worlds on those shelves, but the Library is not a robot, an alien, or a god. It is just an extrapolation of human culture.
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