About 20 years ago I read Ray Kurzweil's
The Age of Spiritual Machines and was fascinated by it. I thought it was the answer to immortality. All I had to do was live long enough to see the singularity and I could download my consciousness into a machine and I could live an eternal productive and happy life without fear of pain or death.
Today I realize how naïve I was. It is clear today what that singularity will bring with it.
Total loss of of individuality, privacy, and freedom. Everyone will essentially be a Borg drone - a conciseness with no shred of humanity remaining.
When you are young and naïve you don't stop to consider the value of such things. Without freedom, individuality, and the right/freedom to explore and express viewpoints that are different from the collective mob you have nothing. Such an existence would be a "living" hell. Quite honestly I hope I die before that possibility presents itself. I feel absolutely certain that anyone who chooses to exist in such a state will be totally exploited by a higher master intelligence which will be totally devoid of any moral values or empathy for their slaves.
The loss of basic freedoms of speech and freedom of expression was something I would have never imagined could have happened in the US just a few years ago, and yet here we are seeing it play out in real time in the past few weeks - and the super AI doesn't even exist yet.
We are rushing toward the edge of a cliff of a dystopian nightmare - a global technocracy that will make the soul and body crushing horrors of communism look mild in comparison.
I think that Elon Musk is one of the few who saw this coming. I believe that is why he believes that getting off the earth and becoming multi-planetary is so important. It's not a natural disaster that we have to fear for the destruction of humanity. It's the singularity... which will be almost impossible to escape here on Earth.