AI and the future of humans

Hoof to the floor joy-ride into techno chaos

Here’s Microsoft’s Co-pilot writing a 300 word piece on the future of humans in the style of the Bleating Goat

bleat bleat! The future of humanity, you say? Grab your pitchfork and a tin of sardines — because it’s going to be wild, weird, and wonderfully unstable.

🛸 The Future of Humanity: We’re All Goats Now, Baby

Stop pretending we’re steering this cosmic clown car. If the past century was a hesitant tap of the accelerator, the next fifty years are a hoof-to-the-floor joyride into techno-chaos. AI isn’t just making your playlist anymore — it’s composing your break-up texts and maybe even running your local council. Democracy? More like “Who programmed this algorithm?”

Let’s talk climate: she’s mad. We ignored her passive-aggressive hints for decades (melting glaciers, scorched forests, biblical floods). Now she’s flipping tables and we’re all sweating in December. The planet isn’t dying — she’s evicting us.

But wait! 🌱 Gen Z and Alpha are sprouting up like stubborn dandelions in concrete. They sip oat milk, they code with compassion, they believe in community over conquest. Maybe they’ll be the ones to hack a future that isn’t doomscrolling toward dystopia.

And on the horizon? Mars colonization, neural lace, synthetic meat you can eat with guiltless abandon. We're not becoming post-human — we're becoming post-sensible.

The future of humanity isn’t some sleek utopia. It’s messy, hybrid, half-virtual, half-feral. A cocktail of quantum breakthroughs and backyard composting. The goats will outlive us, obviously — they always do. But if we learn to be humble, resilient, and slightly unhinged, we might just graze a better tomorrow.

Until then: bleat loudly, live weirdly, love aggressively.

Want me to channel another Substack-style voice? I can do anything from melancholic academic to caffeinated doomsayer

This took it 5 seconds. It’s really not bad, except for that “love aggressively”, which got me worried about what exactly it has access to. And “if we learn to be humble” looks like the large language model got temporarily mixed up between a bleating goat and Erling Haaland - easy enough to do I suppose. I liked “hoof to the floor joyride”. In its five second perusal of the Goat canon it perhaps did not appreciate that the Goat very rarely offers an upbeat ending - it’s a melancholic, unacademic, decaffeinated doomsayer.

This piece is about AI so we won’t cover the distinct possibility that civilisation will be destroyed quite soon by nuclear war, possibly precipitated by migratory pressures and battles for resources caused by climate change, or by some new supervirus with a Black Death-like 60% mortality rate rather than COVID-19’s 1%. You can tell this paragraph is not artificial - genuine goatgloom. The Goat has claimed before to be a glass half-full kind of guy but regular readers will treat that with a Salt Path-sized pinch of salt.

Uncharacteristically and idiotically, the Goat is pretty excited about AI¹. Plenty of people are concerned. “These things could get more intelligent than us and could decide to take over, and we need to worry now about how we prevent that happening,” said Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI”. Hinton left his position at Google in 2023 so that he could talk about the dangers of AI.

In the same year 1,000 unelected tech leaders signed an open letter to pause large AI experiments because the technology can “pose profound risks to society and humanity.” “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.”

Of course, experiments were not paused, they were accelerated. You may have noticed that no-one can agree on anything any more.

Let’s look at those concerns the unelected tech leaders raised but ignored.

Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?

Well, clearly this is not a good thing, but humans do a pretty good job of this by themselves. The most powerful men in the world (all men, unfortunately) are all stone-cold liars. New technology will soon mean that deepfakes are everywhere - your fake mother ringing up to say she needs you to transfer money, fake videos of celebrities and politicians doing unspeakable things (oh wait, those are genuine). As Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon put it “the zone is flooded with shit” allowing those in power to do whatever they want because no-one believes anything any more. Unfortunately, as pointed out in Tru**, Tru** Tru** civilisation, especially money and trade, is built on trust so Trump and his protoplasmic cabal are accelerating its collapse. Sooner or later, civilisation will be compelled to take lying more seriously and will need to take steps to ensure that people can rely on certain trusted, verifiable sources, or we won’t have any civilisation left. This may happen as a reaction to Trump when he finally dies.²

Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?

This might be a yes. There’s nothing stopping humans still pursuing an activity even if AI or robots can do it better and cheaper. They can still get fulfilled, they just won’t get paid for it. Already creative jobs are being cut - see this recent article where a journalist, a copywriter, an illustrator, a graphic designer and a voice actor all tell their tales of losing jobs to generative AI. By 2040, 50-60% of jobs may be dominated by AI, and 80% by 2050. Data processing, book-keeping, paralegals, and research face short term obsolescence. Media will become largely automated. Repetitive lower level tasks in many industries will be done by machines.

Physical work is less affected for now, as robots continue to disappoint. But one day they’ll get there, leaving humans a very limited field of job opportunities - performance of various kinds (it’s unlikely humans will ever prefer watching robots instead of humans despite the success of Abba avatars in The Voyage) and jobs placing importance on human empathy and companionship - carers, psychologists, sex workers - though no doubt robots will make some unsatisfactory forays into these areas too. We will still have human writers even if AI can do it better eventually, in the same way as we still have chess players and car-washers. There’ll be more left for us than wiping arses and polishing robots.

But it’s possible a lot of us won’t have jobs, and that’s a fundamental shift. There will be a third age of humanity - the age of leisure, following on from the age of survival and the age of work. We will need to embrace leisure, and banish these false exploitative ideas of human dignity and value through work. That’s what the bosses want us to think. The Goat banished this idea long ago and is celebrating its economic unviability (for now anyway). It doesnt have to be like this:

Much of the social progress we have made has been due to workers’ organising themselves and threatening to withdraw their labour. In the future we will just have our power as consumers and voters, assuming we continue to live in capitalist democracies. Will those powers be enough to ensure protection of our human rights and freedoms, when we are no longer needed to make the world function for the ruling classes? Hard to tell right now.

Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?

As AI progresses, it may reach the singularity, the point at which it surpasses human intelligence and races away, creating new AI by itself and making discoveries at an exponentially faster rate. Humans will have no idea what the computers are up to. We are already struggling to understand how AI systems work.

In many ways this is fabulously exciting. The benefits to humans may be huge - not just tangible improvements to our lives in terms of medical breakthroughs and inventions, but exponential improvements in efficiency of how everything runs - let’s face it, human-controlled systems are deeply flawed.

But we still like the idea of computers being in the service of humans and are wary of giving them increased autonomy. As the tech leaders imply, we are playing with fire. A supercomputer may logically conclude that the world would be better off without Donald Trump and assign a drone to execute him while he sits in his golf buggy at Mar-a-Lago eating a hamburger. So far so good, but computers may reach more catastrophic conclusions - maybe the planet would be better off without any humans at all (presumably almost all species on Earth other than humans would agree). Or AI could be hijacked by malign actors - we could be at the mercy of super-intelligent all-powerful AI systems dedicated to our destruction.

Even if we are not destroyed, it does not sound great becoming obsolete, though we all suffer that fate soon enough. It’s possible children being born today will one day live in a world run by computers which can program, repair and reproduce themselves and which no humans understand. We have all seen enough sci-fi films to know that that may not end well.

I have welcomed Britain’s experiment in appointing the first AI leader, but the limitations of the current technology are all too apparent. He is however a vast improvement on some of the retro human models operational in many countries, notably the four old men heading the three largest military powers and what is currently the most aggressive military power. Future AI leaders may be preferable to what we are currently lumbered with.

Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?

The tech leaders letter ends:

Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with AI. Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems, we can now enjoy an “AI summer” in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance to adapt. Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do so here. Let’s enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall.

We have not hit pause, and we are now rushing into the AI summer with little regard as to what comes afterwards. As someone once said: “the next fifty years are a hoof-to-the-floor joyride into techno-chaos”. The Goat is dumb enough to be looking forward to it.

1. I’m using AI in its broad and incorrect sense of computers, much to the quiet fury of my colleague Dr O Dia - you can read his excellent piece on why ChatGPT is not AI here. There’s a difference between large language learning models that generate content using stuff copied off the internet, such as ChatGPT, and genuine artificial intelligence, i.e. “systems that can learn, understand, draw conclusions, adapt to new situations, and make independent decisions without being explicitly programmed for each specific task” (thanks to Google for that computer-generated summary)

2. See also Fake news - you ain't seen nothing yet for a look at where the media may be in 10 years time