last night's dream

[evile]

I had a 'back to college' dream that started with me at WGRE talking with one of Greg's best students, and ended with me talking about AI with Elon Musk. As he talked and described it, I was creating sort of a 3-d mixed media collage that was going to somehow become the AI. The thing Elon loved about AI, and the thing that scared me about it, was that each person's AI robot or assistant was 100% focused on the person who owned it; the ultimate expression of libertarianism. The AI would meet their person's wants/needs 100% without consideration for anything else - the planet, other people, finite resources, what have you. Elon talked about how even as an infant your mother doesn't do that for you because she still has her own wants and needs, a spouse, perhaps other children, all of whom she wishes to interact with and help meet their needs, as well as her own. He seemed to be wanting this AI as sort of the best mommy a boy could have...and I was trying to explain to him that human beings' wants and needs are complicated and many contain within them seeds of self destruction, and that an AI would not recognize or care that in meeting a want or need of its owner, it was helping the owner to die.... it was a weird and creepy conversation. And, kind of the billionaire oligarch mindset in a nutshell.