Warning: Comprises spoilers for Pluribus on Apple TV.
Have you ever watched the primary two episodes of Pluribus, the brand new sci-fi collection from Breaking Dangerous and Higher Name Saul creator Vince Gilligan?
I watched the primary two episodes, then had a have a look at a few of the on-line opinions, and I feel there’s one thing they’re all lacking – Pluribus by no means as soon as mentions AI, nevertheless it’s unimaginable for me to observe it with out pondering it’s a deliberate and searing critique of our relationship with it.
A coded message
I spend my days tracking developments from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and the remainder – so I’m in all probability extra attuned to AI than most, however I feel Gilligan is sending us a warning about what occurs when a super-intelligent entity successfully takes over our planet, identical to AI is slowly doing.
In Pluribus the Earth receives a coded message from outer house, originating from over 600 light-years away. It takes Earth’s scientists some time, however as soon as they notice it’s a genetic code – for a virus, of types – they start to recreate it and trial it on some lab rats.
When the virus inevitably escapes into the human inhabitants, the contaminated lose their particular person personalities utterly, and so they begin to commit themselves solely to spreading the virus, which provides them a sense of peace that they’ve by no means identified earlier than. The virus replaces their persona and particular person self with a hyperlink to a hive thoughts. Throughout the virus’s preliminary an infection interval, individuals expertise one thing akin to a seizure, which may clearly trigger devastating accidents relying on what the host was doing on the time of an infection. The worldwide demise toll brought on by crashed automobiles, explosions, fireplace, and downed planes stands at over 88 million even because the survivors, who now share a hive thoughts, clarify the enjoyment of an infection to the final 13 individuals on Earth who’ve to this point proved immune.
The hive-minded people now need nothing greater than to take care of the 13 survivors, making an attempt to be useful to them till in the future they will crack their immunity code and convey them into their doubtful state of serenity. The hive-mind people appear startlingly benign, and may’t commit even small acts of violence in any respect. All they need is that can assist you get issues completed with a customer-service smile that by no means wavers, whereas on the identical time, they’re slowly destroying the world you’ve beforehand identified, and humanity itself.
What can I help you with?
Does that sound like it reminds you of something? Well, to me this is like a human embodiment of the always optimistic and cheerful chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT that I write about day by day. For those who have a look at the homepage of ChatGPT it says in massive letters: “What can I enable you with?”, whereas report after report means that AI is taking our jobs, the massive quantities of energy it requires have devastating environmental impacts, it’s been linked to rising charges of youth anxiety and self-harm, and our economic system would possibly even crash when the AI bubble bursts.
The parallels go additional. One criticism of AI is that it’s eradicating our skill to type genuine human connection. One factor that turned obvious to me very early on within the job was how many individuals have come to depend on AI as their ever-present pal and emotional help. The one ‘individual’ who’s at all times there for them. This was actually made clear to me when ChatGPT went down for a few days earlier this 12 months. We requested our readers how they had been dealing with the outage and obtained lots of of emails from readers desperately making an attempt to manage whereas their always-reliable companion had vanished. There was a equally huge response when OpenAI upgraded to ChatGPT-5 and its persona modified, turning into chillier and agreeable. A number of customers felt like their ‘pal’ had had a persona change, and so they weren’t happy.
In Pluribus, Seahorn’s character resists all makes an attempt made by the hive-mind to type emotional connections as a result of she is aware of it’s not actual – and that she’s not speaking to an individual anymore.
The query is, how lengthy can she resist? How lengthy earlier than she accepts the hive-mind as her pal and stops preventing again?
Gilligan’s hive thoughts is perhaps fiction, however the smile is actual – glowing from each chatbot window, at all times prepared to assist, till in the future we notice too late that we’ve been those rewritten.
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