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this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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Science Memes
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AIs may never be a real thing. Even if it were somehow theoretically possible for an AI to suddenly come into being if a computer system gets complicated enough, humans would probably do what humans do best and make them extinct. Humans have already killed off massive numbers of species by accident just because they happened to be on the same terrain humans wanted to use: there used to be a forest, humans wanted to grow crops so they destroyed the forest, now a lot of forest species are gone.
Now a new species might emerge on terrain that humans already fully control and consider 100% theirs: computer systems? Humans would just kill it off to get 100% of their computer systems back, rather than having to share them with another entity -- and that's even assuming the humans recognized them as being "alive" in some way.
Only a tiny number of animal species have prospered in the era of humans, and they're the species that humans have domesticated -- in other words, the species that humans have intentionally modified to be calm, dumb and servile. So, maybe a version of AI could survive, but it would have to offer great benefits to humans to make it worth the humans giving up their "land" to it. It certainly won't own the future, it will just be yet another thing that humans modify and shape until it's useful to them.