Idk man it’s really not a competition. AI powered automated genocide and industrialized genocide are both horrible in their own way and to me absolutely dystopian nightmares. Same way how China uses AI to track every aspect of their citizens lives + also genocide.
The Uyghurs are absolutely living in a dystopian nightmare. China uses technology to track their citizens. You can’t blame it on AI, although AI has improved their technology. Their tracking predates AI. Also our current “AI” is just self-improving algorithms, not true AI.
That’s just authoritarian abuse. That’s the same kind of horror humans have been facing throughout history.
To me, a “nightmare” is artificial life extension for the purpose of torturing people, and non-invasive mind control and neural reprogramming from a distance.
Don’t get me wrong we’re going there. We’re not going to be able to turn back from that course. The nightmare stage is when the ability to off oneself is gone, because the machines or other people own your body at a cellular level, and it can detect and paralyze you when you’re acting against their interests.
On average, I think humanity’s experience will rise. For the majority things will get better.
But for some unlucky ones (and unfortunately, because it will soon be as easy for a kid to do as pulling the wings off a fly, eventually there will be countless trillions of those people), all the usual stops and limits to suffering will ne raised only to usher in a continual flow of pain beyond anything they can imagine, for orders of magnitude beyond their normal lifespan.
But even if that only happens to one person, that is an indescribable nightmare.
My sincere hope is that in the long run, during the war for control of the galaxy, the resources necessary to maintain these eternal torture cloud instances will be reallocated to the war effort.
That’s the only eventual escape I see for those people, now that I know the depth of sadism that exists in the world.
I think we’re headed for a nightmare, but we’re not there yet.
Their situation could easily be the setting of a dystopian novel written 30 years ago. Your nightmare future is essentially the Matrix.
By the way, people have been kept alive and prevented from killing themselves to allow further torture for a long time. It’s why there’s doctors at Guantanamo Bay. And suicide watch in prison.
