Since the Neolithic Revolution, technological advancements have generally supported increasing cooperation within larger populations, for both production and military strength. The industrial revolution exploited concentrated workforces, complex supply chains, mass markets, and large armies. Even the emergence of awesomely destructive nuclear weapons didn’t practically facilitate the reduction of population. On the contrary, their value being in generating the mutual desire to avoid their use, they have increased cooperation and interdependence across the global population. AI and robotics fundamentally break mass civilization’s cooperative patterns, representing a qualitatively different technological threshold with unprecedented implications.
We should be extremely concerned about any weaponry that doesn’t require significant manpower to deploy and is highly effective at killing as many people as its operators choose, without spoiling the environments in which it is deployed. For example, we can imagine a bioweapon that is guaranteed to quickly kill 99.99% of people while sparing other species, the few humans that have been clandestinely innoculated, and some lucky survivors. All would effectively be delivered to a New Earth.
Because the capabilities we are describing are unprecedented, changing the status quo which has governed social behavior for thousands of years, one struggles to find a good word for the action being described here. The author proposes “populectomy” to capture the idea of intentionally excising most people to achieve a much smaller human population.
AI tasked with his purpose is, in a sense, just one of several candidates. What sets AI apart from bioweapons, however, is that it competes directly with humans in their performance of useful functions. Unlike previous technological shifts that supported increasing human participation, in war and in peace, AI creates a technological path that systematically excludes most humans from these necessities. Social arrangements will eventually “price in” the diminished utility of strangers to one another, removing normative barriers to the elimination of zero-sum competitors. AI doesn’t just provide the means and opportunity, it also reinforces the motive.