Doubtful. This assumes machines with general intelligence will think and behave like the humans who indirectly instigate the emergence of these alien intelligences. This is highly unlikely. Although we are the only species with which we can communicate through complex language, we are not the only intelligence on Earth. From gorillas to dogs (which are far less human than we loving owners anthropomorphically project onto them to be) to ants to even intelligent systems that use chemical feedback instead of electrochemical neurons (such as forests), the variety in types of intelligences seems almost as diverse as the number of kinds of intelligent systems. Ergo, this observation would seem to suggest generally intelligent machines - which will be more evolved than directly programmed - will be strikingly inhuman. They might take over and treat us as pets like the Minds in Banks’ Culture novels. But they might just as well simply ignore us as they take command of the planet’s resources.
Nor should we assume they will be recursively self-aware individuals like us. They could well be able to take over without there being a Skynet we can deal, fight or negotiate with. Again, most robot uprising movies are anthropomorphized myths on par with the animism and archetypal pantheons of human religions.
Finally, it may be that self-awareness really is a unique advantage and that humans will remain in executive control simply by virtue of being the only intelligence interested in dominating all the rest. In which case the question remains: who among us will give the orders? The direction it’s heading now is the elite investor class. In part because of automation, we’re transitioning into an age when wealth cannot be grown by work, but only by having an abundance of it to begin with.
When people can no longer get ahead by hard work, but those with lots of wealth can accumulate ever more merely by investing it, the outcome is obvious. A rigid class structure will freeze a permanent underclass and a distantly wealthy ruling class who will have the money and means to control things like elections and intellectual property laws, facilitating their exclusive access to ownership. As the French aristocracy learned the hard way in the late eighteenth century, folks will only stand for that for so long before they take ownership by force of what they were not allowed to own as serfs. The modern global aristocracy learned well the lessons of underclass revolution. Whatever they claim to be, from Chinese “communist” party elites to Randian “free market” capitalists, they know a permanent underclass without access to basic essentials and distractions will eventually revolt. This is why you hear some of the more forward-looking of them beginning to make noises about universal basic income. But this isn’t a new idea and it isn’t a strategy to liberate the masses. Keeping people on the dole, to borrow and old phrase, is a way to keep them pacified.
If I may offer friendly dissent - because I think a lot of creative and/or high IQ types will try to console themselves with the belief that they can still thrive no matter what happens around them - it’s all connected. If the jobs market implodes, the mass unemployment and all the problems that follow will make the economy untenable even for the workers who can still do jobs machines have yet to learn to do as well or better.
Make it easier to cover up the genocides?
