You are stranded on an otherwise uninhabited island. Food is abundant, there's a pristine freshwater spring, and a dry and spacious cave for shelter. Survival is not a concern, you can live out the rest of your natural life on this island in relative comfort, but you know you will never be rescued.
Also on this island are two big black boxes. Inside one is a human being. Inside the other is an advanced artificial intelligence. You know this, but you don't know which is which. These boxes can not be opened. But you can have a verbal conversation with either. The AI is designed to emulate a human in every way. It has a detailed fictional history, and is programmed never to reveal the fact that it is not a human. (How the person in the box survives and how the AI is powered is irrelevant, this is just a thought experiment.)
You have one week. During this week you can have lengthy conversations with either box. You can discuss any topic you like. But no amount of clever questioning will give you any hint which box contains the human and which contains the AI. Jiggle the boxes, bang on them with a rock, nothing you can do will give you any idea which is which. But this game isn't about trying to figure out which is which. And although these boxes can't help you pick bananas or go fishing, they can provide you with one invaluable service: companionship.
At the end of the week, you have to choose one of the two boxes to keep, and the other is airlifted away. (Why not just airlift you away... again, thought experiment.) The box you choose will be your only conversational companion for the rest of your life, and you will never be able to open the box to see whether you chose the person or the artificial intelligence.
The question is this. Immediately after the other box is taken away, and you're sitting there with your chosen lifelong conversational partner, do you care what is inside the box?
How you respond to that question might reveal something about how comfortable you will be integrating into our new, AI-enabled society. And make no mistake, we are already in that society. If you are in any way connected to "the grid", you are already interacting with AI every day. You might not see it directly, but it's underneath virtually every digital system you use.
Are you comfortable with that? Are you somewhat reluctant to embrace it now, but think you'll eventually get there? Or are you an anti-AI stalwart?
If you're in that "stalwart" category, you need to throw your smartphone and laptop into the trash right now. Every operation you do with those devices now kicks off a dozen processes in AI datacenters across the planet, which require electricity, which requires burning more fossil fuels and evaporating more fresh water. Even if all those datacenters were powered entirely by renewable energy sources (which would be great but isn't happing anytime soon), using them would still create additional computing load that drives further growth in AI hardware infrastructure, consuming even more of the planet's limited resources.
Understand, I'm not unsympathetic to the stalwarts' cause. I just see no evidence anywhere that they are doing anything meaningful to advance that cause. Complaining about the issue on social media? Voting Green Party? Lot of positive thinking? These won't accomplish anything. I certainly wouldn't recommend any sort of violence or eco-terrorism, that would just make everything way worse for everyone, especially the perpetrators. And it wouldn't slow down the AI steamroller one bit anyway, it would just drive the public away from supporting the cause.
Meanwhile, every time a stalwart posts something on social media about the evils of AI, they are passively advancing the very thing they claim to oppose. But everyone needs to communicate, so I guess the planet will have to take one more hit for the team. Still, I'm very curious, what's the plan here? I see so many people falling into the terrible mental trap of "well, I'm not actually taking any action myself, but the things I'm saying will hopefully inspire other people to take action on my behalf". That never happens. All that does is create enormous echo chambers where everyone thinks their chatter is somehow advancing their cause, when in reality, all that effort is just going straight down the drain. And invoking a bunch of AI background processes to boot.
If I'm reaching any solid anti-AI activists out there, please tell us, what's the plan?