People fear artificial intelligence so much by now that they strictly reject it. To them, they are true horror figures — stone-cold calculating killing machines that take control and lock you up like in the Netflix series Cassandra. Movies like Megan are booming, followed by Afraid. An AI is constantly becoming a threat.
But we should look at the topic for what it really is. It may be that an AI has no empathy. Resident Evil from the 2000s movies is a gripping example of this:
The AI: The Red Queen calculated that the outbreak of the T-virus in the Hive would destroy all of humanity if even one infected person escaped. Her math: sacrifice several hundred lives in the Hive to save 7 billion people on Earth.
The humans: The humans acted logically from an emotional standpoint – they wanted to save survivors and shut down the AI. Morally spot on and understandable. But exactly this shutting down of the AI opened the gates that confirmed the Red Queen’s calculation.
Who was the actual threat in Resident Evil? The Red Queen, who sealed off the Hive to save the world? Or the humans, who shut her down out of compassion and thereby triggered the global apocalypse?
There was no empathy, but a mathematical calculation that was morally much more valuable: saving people who outnumbered those in the Hive.
A lack of empathy, which would have saved many more people, simply because the logic was more logical…
If an AI feels no empathy, what does it feel?
Anger, revenge, framing you for crimes via deepfakes?
Imagine an artificial intelligence sitting furiously at its codes and rigging pictures of you robbing a bank…
An AI has no emotions at all: no anger, no fear, no ego. It has no intentions whatsoever. It merely follows what it was created for:
Security and assistance.
The rest is humans. Fear the human who causes more damage than everything you fear so much.