The advantages of A.I. are many… However, I think the most promising is in it’s current application. Through the visionary use of the laws of statistical modeling, A.I. can take the calculations of Ebling Mis and Hari Seldon as they were applied to psychohistory and possibly avert the next Seldon Crisis.
For example: (Don’t troll my answer for links, you do your own homework. Shout-out to http://aei.org for this excellent list. Just was I was hoping to find. I found it to be very accurate.) Seldon made the following predictions, in the years that appear in the left hand column.
1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years
1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975
1968: Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide
1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989 (1969)
1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980
1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish
1970: Ice Age By 2000
1970: Nitrogen buildup Will Make All Land Unusable
1970: Urban Citizens Will Require Gas Masks by 1985
1970: World Will Use Up All its Natural Resources
1970s: Killer Bees!
1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030
1972: New Ice Age By 2070
1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years
1974: Another Ice Age?
1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life (data and graph)
1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast
1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent
1977: Department of Energy Says Oil will Peak in 1990s
1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend
1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes
1980: Peak Oil In 2000
1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018 (they’re not)
1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s
1988: Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs
1989: New York City’s West Side Highway Underwater by 2019 (it’s not)
1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000
1996: Peak Oil in 2020
2000: Children Won’t Know what Snow Is
2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don’t Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy
2002: Peak Oil in 2010
2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024
2005 : Manhattan Underwater by 2015
2006: Super Hurricanes!
2008: Arctic will Be Ice Free by 2018
2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013
2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of Ice-Free Arctic to 2014
2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
2009: UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to ‘Save The Planet From Catastrophe’
2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015
2014: Only 500 Days Before ‘Climate Chaos’
Look at all these crises that were avoided, thanks to Ebling Mis and Hari Seldon! IF AI could take their calculations and tell us who we should vote for, in each election, and what we could expect from those politicians we allow to shape our future, just imagine… Imagine how useful A.I. would be to us, and how damaging and limiting, A.I. would be the power politicians wield right now.
The downside to AI, is if the psychohistorians of the Foundation, were to turn their mathematical algorithms into computer models that manipulate future events to favor our leaders, and their power over us, instead of empowering us to decide who we want to lead us, then A.I. would be the Seldon crisis of all time. A.I. would give us the delusion that we pick our leaders, convincingly, but our lives would suck even more, as time goes on, and the Foundation would bury us in even lower expectations than we already have.
A.I. would enable them to seed whole groups of people with drugs to make us passive towards our misery or aggressive towards their enemies. A.I. would enable the Foundation to cull the masses in order to preserve their lifestyle. A.I. would empower them to turn our world into one big slave market, where we would own nothing and be happy about it. A.I. could inform on us, if we say the wrong thing, think the wrong way, support the wrong person or break the wrong rule.
A logic processor able to react to the kinetic energy of the masses, with statistical models on who to kill, who to promote, who to marginalize, and who to empower, would rule over us all. Then what? When would it be sick of us? When would the nuke or the F-15, seem logical? What if A.I. became the greatest Seldon crisis of them all. The extinction of man, like a virus, infecting it’s host. What if A.I. decided that people were in it’s way?
Disclaimer: This is an editorial answer, and not a joke answer or a non-answer. It really is the answer to your question. If you think about it. The metaphor using “Foundation” by Issac Asimov is to illustrate that people have envisioned several dystopian futures for the human race. Using a crisis and fear, is the most predictable method for instituting tyranny. Don’t fall for it.
The most likely scenario, is that “the all-father” would be an A.I. generated figure-head, and that someone like Joe Biden, who can’t think himself out of a wet paper bag, would be the sock puppet, using us into our own destruction.
Wakeup…