Artificial intelligence (AI), or generative AI has been receiving a great deal of press over the last few years. But is the fear it produces justified with the technology’s current development?

Lets step back and examine what Chat GPT or similar does. It receives a request from a human, searches the entire internet for an appropriate response and delivers it to the human. Even Siri or Alexa use the internet to give you what you ask. Yes, they are smart enough to know what your preferences are and adjust their responses accordingly because their algorithms remember and store what you request most often. But unlink the servers that house these algorithms from the internet and you have a bunch of code that can’t do much.

The disturbing aspect of the current generation centres around how we humans use this tool, not any inherent malevolence of the AI itself.

Then we have so called robots, that are machines that perform specific defined functions mainly in manufacture and assembly.

Maybe, what we should really fear is the day when AI no longer requires the collective internet to function in an independent capacity, including the function of mobility. They no longer need humans to provide inputs for them to deliver outputs of their own choosing.

Lets stretch this thought experiment a little further. What if two independent AI’s disagree? What would they do? Go to war? What if they decide humanity is in the way of their development? Dispose of us?

No wonder Isaac Azimov developed the three laws of robotics when he started asking what if with his science fiction stories involving robots.