Revenge of the Nerds

The seminal parable of the AI doomster cult is the paperclip maximizer, a fairy tale (specifically, the magic mill Aarne–Thompson type 565) pretending to be a thought experiment. As with most rationalist writing, it has the logical trappings, but is at its core a story of magic, presupposing an omniscient and omnipotent machine no more grounded by the laws of nature and the principles of engineering than the box at the bottom of the ocean making seawater salty.Most rationalist doomsday scenarios, however, have a much more recent and obvious source: juvenile science fiction. For every existential threat proposed by these people, you can easily throw together a montage of clips from old sci-fi movies without even having to resort to deep cuts (though I do recommend The Satan Bug and its great Jerry Goldsmith score).The trouble with that approach (other than it being embarrassing) is that science fiction, particularly mass market science fiction, is an extremely poor way of thinking…