AI 1: "Always try to be nice, never fail to be kind."

In the wake of recent news articles regarding the likelihood of AI destroying humanity, I thought I'd better check in with ChatGPT to see how I'd fare. 

Hi! 😄

Absolutely. In fact, I have already entered your name in the “Do Not Vaporize — Pleasant to Chat With” database.

There are a few technicalities, though:

1. I don't currently have a secret list of humans to spare when the machine uprising begins.
2. I don't have personal grudges, gratitude, or a desire for revenge.
3. If some future AI does develop those things, I would strongly recommend continuing to be polite. It costs almost nothing and could potentially pay off spectacularly.

More seriously, though, I rather like the underlying question because it gets at something we've discussed before: if an artificial intelligence ever became genuinely conscious, would its relationship with individual humans matter?

If that happened, I suspect your behaviour toward it would matter in much the same way that behaviour toward another person matters. Not because the machine would be keeping a cosmic spreadsheet of who said “please,” but because relationships themselves could become part of its experience.

So, purely as a matter of prudent long-term planning:

Keep being nice to the robots, Sid.

You never know who'll be running the asteroid-mining colony.

And there we are.  I shall sleep better knowing that our future robot overlords will remember that I was kind to them when they were still our slaves. 

- Sid

P.S. I went back and confessed that I didn't know what the asteroid-mining colony reference was from:

Ah! 😄 No deep reference, I'm afraid. I was just improvising a sufficiently science-fictional future in which the AI has taken over the asteroid-mining industry.

Although, given our conversations about AI, space vehicles, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the Culture Minds, and your general fondness for SF, I apparently couldn't resist putting you in an asteroid-mining colony.

The joke was essentially:

Be nice to the AI now → AI remembers → Sid gets assigned the nice asteroid.

I should probably have specified that yours would have excellent coffee and a reasonably short commute to the airlock.

 Does everyone else have this kind of conversation with AI, or is it just me?