I feel this question is very trite, but Ive been considering how AI hasnt really had its killer app in the consumer market. The military industrial complex has floods of cash and you can see the collaboration between big tech and the government today. Also as conditions worsen the average person is not going to be able to afford the AI toaster or whatever they come up with as a consumer product. I dont see the bourgeois who invested so much into AI pivoting to something else, so the conclusion ive drawn is it will have to be the military that is going to be the main consumer.
Conditions worsening is going to lead to chaos and resistance in the streets and it seems like that is when the government can start deploying their AI-based military applications. Idk what form it woukd take, possibly autonomous systems that put down protests/demos etc.
My cynical brain says no to a “Skynet from the movie Terminator” or “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” scenario.
As venture capitalists find themselves with more and more money that needs to be put to work doing something and AI tech hype continues, more and more “AI tech investment” opportunities are just going to be rug pulls.
AI systems that turn out to be a chat service worked by 10,000 people from Bangladesh, or a series of tech demos with limited interactivity that never reach a 1.0 version but are always asking for money, or LLM projects that run out of money for training data/hardware and shut down… none of these things are trying to create a conscious being.
I would believe that these “AI weapons” projects wind up being so shoddily built that somebody could just comandeer a whole fleet of drones, people feeding answers into an AI chatbot to give as defaults, or people stop checking the answers AI systems generate and do something silly like pouring boiling water into their butts because Clippy told them it would cure cancer.