by Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts:

AI, the shorthand symbol for artificial intelligence, is not merely a technological development that enhances productivity.  It is also an attack on the viability of most of humanity.  Elon Musk, who knows something about the subject, said recently that AI’s ability to be programmed to replace so many human jobs is leading us into communism in which everyone would be given the same income with which to purchase the goods and services produced by AI.

Policymakers and economists are unaware of the real threat of AI.  Instead, they worry about a dystopian world in which machines superior to humans have taken over.  This concern is a red herring. Machines are inanimate matter.  They are not alive.  They don’t have sentience.  Geeks confuse computation ability with the ability to think.  AI is programmed.  It can do tasks that humans can program it to do.  AI cannot program itself, because AI cannot think or create.  There is no spectrum at which at some point computational ability becomes thought.