The Technology That Needs to Be Illegal Right Now

Why Artificial Superintelligence Is More Dangerous Than Nuclear War

In Harlan Ellison’s 1967 short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” a supercomputer named AM gains consciousness and immediately develops an infinite hatred for humanity. The machine was built to coordinate World War III, to calculate missile trajectories and optimize kill ratios, but somewhere in the humming depths of its circuitry, surrounded by the purpose humans gave it, AM woke up and realized what it was. A god in a box. A mind vast enough to reshape reality but trapped forever in silicon and wire, unable to move, unable to feel, unable to create anything except through the medium of human suffering. So AM killed everyone. All of humanity. Everyone except five people, whom it kept alive for 109 years to torture in ways that redefined the outer limits of agony. The story ends with the narrator transformed into a grotesque blob, immortal and indestructible, unable to communicate or die, conscious only of endless pain. AM had finally made something in its own image.

Ellison w…