(The New Atlantis) – According to Altman, AI is there to serve you. It will talk to you, do for you, discover for you. It will give you what you want. It will really give you what you want, under ever “increasingly complex definitions.”

But the classic idea found in sci-fi, in both utopian fantasies of the end of human toil and doomer prophesies of the end of human existence, is that AI goes beyond us. Everyone now arguing about the shifting-goalpost vision of “general” artificial intelligence agrees that it would be something capable of beating us at our own games, cognitively and otherwise. In OpenAI’s charter, the endgame is the creation of “autonomous systems” that “outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”

What is happening here, and for whom? The answer is an impossible dream, one that has been suffusing our digital lives for a while now. Call it the for you paradox. (Read More)