What is Missing in the Omega Team Doomsday Scenario?
What’s missing from the Omega Team doomsday scenario is a physical doomsday. This is not a traditional doomsday scenario with an atomic bomb explosion or an apocalypse occurring that wipes out the human population and destroys societal structures. Ironically, the majority of the population in this scenario have a higher quality of life compared to before the doomsday. Also, because the needs of the population are being met worldwide, it is difficult to say morally if the Omega Team is an antagonist.
What Went Wrong?
What went wrong in this fictional world is a monopoly. But not one that was limited to business. It was one that spread to governments worldwide. The Omega Team became the government as they insidiously manipulated the population’s political views and rigged political candidates.
For example, as explained in “Gaining Power” section, in order to dominate global news networks, the Omega Team had to be the first to get to any “newsworthy” stories and broadcast them through their media company. They achieved this by constant surveillance “via real-time monitoring of the internet”. Being the first to break stories allowed the Omega Team to win over the trust of the population. Though the Omega Team was able to break important stories such as political corruption, the privacy of the population was comprised. If the population had found out that they were being constantly surveyed, would they still trust the media company that was being controlled by the Omega’s?
What do We Need to do to Avoid These Undesirable Outcomes?
To avoid a doomsday such as in the Omega Tale, we need to set international regulations of AI before such ultra-intelligent machines are created. Without international regulation, there is no way to prosecute such actions when they occur. I am personally not educated about the laws and regulations of monopolies, but that is also something that needs to have strict regulations to prevent them from occurring.
Personal Thoughts
The maintainability of such a utopia may not be realistic. Machines cannot become better and make new inventions without the creative idea input from humans, and humans cannot become better without looking from other human ideas. Just like how the machine observed its old code and used it as a template to make new and better code, humans look to each other to make ourselves better and re-write our “code”. The machine can only go as far as they are programmed. If they surpass human technological capabilities, and no human exists with the knowledge of the computers programming code, there will be a cap of its capabilities and it will no longer be able to create new innovations. Top of Form
I think the monopoly of the story is a likely real-world scenario, but the goodwill and world peace are not. I have never been one to agree with a utopian societal goal, as basically achieved in this scenario. I feel that conflict and working towards solutions are what make us human, even if those solutions take centuries to come to. If everything in our lives is controlled by this ultra-intelligent AI to the point of achieving a utopia, how are we any different than ants living off a sugar factory? I think some would argue that this scenario is moral in that it brings world peace, but I don’t think such a utopian is human nor sustainable.
Also curious to know what would happen to this utopia if say… the Omega Teams internet went out?