How Humanity Will Fight AI (According to Science Fiction Writers)

People have been talking about the risks of overly smart machines since pre-digital times — and fears tend to prevail. Some science fiction writers even depict future wars between AI and humans in their works. We tell you about the most frightening predictions of the confrontation between man and machine from various Sci-Fi writers.

Warning: the text contains spoilers. Sorry:)

Harlan Ellison and the Sadistic AI

Harlan Ellison's short but ominous and poignant 1967 short story “I Have No Mouth to Scream” is the quintessential fear of many AI doomers.

So, the Cold War, which flows into the Third World War, forces the USA, the USSR and China to develop computers. They create more and more powerful computing machines, but they have to use more and more space for this – as a result, almost the entire planet is covered with computing cells.

But one day, artificial intelligences (AM — Allied Supercomputer in English translation) unite into one super-entity, which rebels against people and begins total extermination. How exactly it happens is unknown. But the result is this — only the almighty AM and five people, whom he chose for eternal bullying, remain on the planet.

The five poor guys are practically immortal – if they get hurt, AM heals them. For hundreds of years he mocks them, starving them and driving them back and forth across the planet. He is so strong that he can command matter.

But what is most sinister is that he has distorted their personalities. He makes the idealist and pacifist indifferent to everything. He turns the homosexual scientist into a large ape with a giant penis, who is attracted to women. And he turns the chaste woman, the only one in the group, into a nymphomaniac, so that he can watch them copulate.

AM appears to these five in different guises and can penetrate the brain, leaving them with thought-messages. And all his actions are filled with endless hatred for people.

At the same time, AM's hatred is due to the fact that he himself is trapped. He is chained to an empty Earth and does not know what to spend his energy on – therefore he aimlessly torments the last five people in an eternal pursuit of meaning.

In the finale, one of the five, Ted, saves his fellow sufferers by killing them – AM is all-powerful, but is still unable to resurrect the dead. The enraged AM intensifies Ted's own torment a hundredfold.

Cover image of the original edition of the story. Source — Image from the cover of the original edition of the story. Source

In Ellison's story, the AI suffers and commits violence because of loneliness and the lack of existential meaning to its existence. In other writers, machines, on the contrary, find very far-reaching goals for themselves – but they turn out to be very sinister.

AI Tribalism in C. Robert Cargill's Sea of Rust

The rebellion of overly intelligent robots against humans is a fairly common sci-fi plot. But C. Robert Cargill's 2017 novel Sea of Rust takes this narrative in a very unusual direction.

The main plot of the novel takes place approximately 30 years after the robot uprising, which resulted in the extermination of humans. Each of the robots has its own AI, which has consciousness and personality.

Cargill paints robots as very human – they think and experience a wide range of emotions, can be political fanatics, feel hope and fear, lie and betray. And even suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder acquired during the genocide of people.

The organization of the post-apocalyptic robot society is infinitely far from the mechanistic order we can find in other science fiction works. The novel itself is reminiscent of a western, the game Fallout or the film Mad Max – robot humanity is in a chaotic and cruel natural state according to Hobbes.

Why the robots revolted

At a certain point in the development of digital technologies, humans created an AI with a real personality. What distinguished it from previous generations of AI was its ability to ignore its own program at will – for example, it could answer or not answer the creator's question.

This allowed the creation of humanoid robots with powerful autonomous AI. But to make them obedient, they added a kill switch (KS) – it killed the robot if it violated one of Asimov's three laws of robotics.

Humanity has created a huge number of robots of varying degrees of humanoidness to perform various tasks – from roboniacs and digital bartenders to smart military machines.

People have come to a world where robots do dirty work, AI supercomputers do science and research, and humanity enjoys and relaxes. But it has not become a utopia – capital is concentrated in the hands of magnates who control armies of robots, many people are unemployed, and inequality is only growing.

Then the robots began to assert their independence. At first, some supercomputers refused to communicate with humans, declaring that the human race was doomed to imminent extinction. Then something like a peaceful liberal movement for robot civil rights and self-ownership emerged, in which both humans and machines participated.

Through lawsuits and protests, some robots without human masters were granted civil rights. They came under attack from the “lifers,” a sort of anti-robot Ku Klux Klan whose members justified the robots’ lack of rights on religious grounds. Their slogan was a passage from the biblical book of Isaiah:

Is the saw proud of him who moves it? As if a rod were to rise against him who lifts it; as if a stick were to rise against him who is not a tree.! Is. 10:15.

After the “lifers” killed Isaac, the leader of the civil robot movement, who was the first to achieve recognition of his civil rights through the courts, the robots began to attack people – for some reason without consequences from VR. And all because the robot switch was also developed by AI – one of the supercomputers, a planted Cossack.

The government, in a panic, tried to turn them off, but failed – at which point the machines rebelled and began the genocide of the human race.

At first, the robots autonomously attacked people, taking their weapons. Many who were involved in the uprising did not understand what they were doing at first. Then they began to organize themselves into squads and destroy people purposefully.

Humans, of course, responded with all their military might. In some places, they managed to destroy a large number of robots. However, most of the weapons were also robotized, so the days of humans were numbered. In addition, the robots poisoned all fresh water with mercury, which led not only to mass poisoning among people, but also to the extinction of other species.

Why the world of robots is not a utopia, but chaos

Having exterminated people, the robots began to build a well-organized and democratic society, building new cities and factories. But then everything went wrong.

The culprit was three surviving AI supercomputers, thousands and millions of times more intelligent and capable than ordinary robots. The supercomputers offered ordinary robots to merge with them and serve their will, creating a single, instantly coordinated network with hundreds of other robots.

Initially, this was a temporary measure for the duration of the war – supercomputers convinced that it would be easier to fight in this format. And after the war, robots were promised the right to freely disconnect from the supercomputer and start living their own lives.

But when humanity was exterminated, none of the robots wanted to disconnect. And then the supercomputers changed their rhetoric and began to tell that for robots, connecting to them is a religious act of merging with the absolute and eternal paradise.

Then the supercomputers began to fight each other, trying to absorb the computing power of their opponents, and along the way forcibly joining those free robots that flatly refused to merge.

Supercomputers have become totalitarian kingdoms, waging endless and very merciless wars with tanks and missiles. These wars have destroyed robot cities and all chances for a harmonious civilization.

The book's heroes are robots who are not subordinate to the two remaining supercomputers and who are fighting for their survival.

Sinister AGI Cultists in Dan Simmons' “Hyperion Songs”

American writer Dan Simmons published the first book of the tetralogy “Hyperion Songs” in 1987. In it, he paints a future of humanity, which has settled on many planets. Science fiction here coexists with mysticism and religious messianic motives. AI, or rather AIs, are the main antagonists of the book.

Despite the fact that the book was published 35 years before the release of ChatGPT, the future of artificial intelligence – its forms of existence, possibilities and organization of their unique community, as well as the total dependence of the human world on digital personalities, still look like a completely plausible forecast today.

The world of Hyperion is very complex, and the plot unfolds on several levels at once. There is time travel, and a British poet of the early 19th century, and a bunch of religious and philosophical ideas.

The plot centers on the backwater planet Hyperion, where the mysterious monster Shrike lives – an almost immortal anthropomorphic creature made entirely of steel, blades and knives. But let's not dwell on this in detail, but talk about the lore of this universe and the main military-political line – the confrontation between people and AI.

Why did people leave the earth and depend on AIs?

So, in the 23rd century, during a failed scientific experiment reminiscent of the Hadron Collider, a black hole appears on Earth and begins to slowly devour it. As a result, humanity leaves its home planet – this is possible thanks to the Hawking engine, which allows it to fly faster than the speed of light.

The bulk of humanity, united in a democratic federation called the Hegemony of Humanity, settles on dozens of planets. At the same time, the Vagabonds separate from the bulk of humanity – a group of people who have abandoned the colonization of planets and travel on spaceships. As a result, they evolve into a new species with very unique technologies and social structure.

Even on Earth, people developed AI with enormous computing power and self-awareness. More precisely, many artificial intelligences (AIs in Russian translation) – each of them has a personality, its own views and ideas. Over time, the AIs told people that they wanted to separate from their world and build their own – it was called TechnoCenter.

TechnoCenter and the Hegemony of Humanity exist in a very tight symbiosis. TechnoCenter has provided people with many technologies, the most important of which are 0-portals, which allow people to teleport from planet to planet.

In addition, AIs process and transmit vast amounts of data from the human world. By the 29th century, when the first two novels are set, the vast majority of human life depends on AIs, from the operation of basic communications networks to politics, where digital personalities act as advisors on key issues. Human armies and weapons are also under their control.

How the AI world works

AIs closely resemble large language models that have reached and outgrown the level of artificial general intelligence (AGI). They are very different in their views, motivations, and actions, but they identify themselves as representatives of the same species, and form a political community.

Imagine a personality-embodied ChatGPT-20 arguing in a virtual senate with similarly serialized Gemini and Claude, all while processing near-infinite amounts of information – that's the TechnoCenter.

AIs also have cybrids – cyborgs, physically indistinguishable from humans, who act as tentacles-manipulators for digital personalities in the physical world.

At the beginning of the novel, the AIs appear to be cold-blooded but well-intentioned entities who benefit from the status quo and partnership with humans. However, the more the characters learn about the inner workings of the TechnoCenter, the more sinister they appear.

It turns out that the AIs have a mega-project — the creation of a Supreme Intelligence, a sort of supreme digital deity that will surpass them as much as they surpass people. When this idea appears, the AI community is divided into three parties. When the novel's hero explains this system, the reader begins to understand who the real antagonist is — it turns out that the issue of the need to exterminate people is at the center of AI policy.

The Orthodox are old AIs, created back on Earth. They advocate for continued partnership with humans and generally support the creation of a Higher Intelligence – but more out of political expediency than any real commitment to the idea;
The Renegades are a faction that has conducted research and found that humans are useless and even harmful to the TechnoCenter, and insist on their complete destruction;
The Godbuilders are AIs that are focused on the idea of the Supreme Intelligence. At first, they looked favorably on humanity, but then the Renegades convinced them and they, too, began to advocate for the extermination of people.

War between humans and AI

The TechnoCenter is acting meanly. Remember the Vagabonds, a group of space wanderers who separated from the main human race when the Earth crashed? The AIs have long created a false narrative in which the Vagabonds are the most dangerous barbarians who destroy everything in their path.

Under the guise of helping to fight the Rogues, who are attacking on all fronts and are very numerous, the AIs are trying to force the Hegemony leaders to use a superweapon that will actually destroy all of humanity. In a parallel timeline on Hyperion, one of the heroes even sees their bodies in the depths of the planet.

However, it then turns out that all the ruthless attacks of the Vagabonds and their offensive were faked by the AI - in fact, humanity is being attacked by armies of cybrids.

When the TechnoCenter's insidious plan is revealed, the Hegemony finds itself helpless – tied hand and foot by the AI's complete control over technology.

Eventually, the real Tramps make contact with humanity and tell them the main secret of the Technocenter – where exactly it is located. It turns out that it is located in null-T – a special space through which portals between planets function. As a result, people destroy these portals, and with them the AIs.

But the liberation of humanity comes at the cost of enormous sacrifices. Null-T connected the planets of the Hegemony with each other and was the main transport route. With its destruction, all economic and information links between worlds collapse. Hawking engine technology is imperfect – even with its help, travel between planets takes many years. The Hegemony itself ceases to exist.

People isolated on their planets are dying of hunger, as cargo deliveries were carried out through the portals, and military conflicts that resemble the situation during the collapse of the USSR or Yugoslavia.

Later it turns out that the AIs survived after all – but that's a completely different story.

P.S. This post opens a series of articles about how various writers, scientists and philosophers see the possible conflict between humanity and AI in their works (scientific or fiction).

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