The Last Answer

Read the non-interactive version. The next morning was the apocalypse that Amodei had predicted. Only there wasn’t any fire, there wasn’t a mob of protesters, the power wasn’t even cut off. We were all alive. He was wrong about the details. This was a quiet apocalypse. A sort of silent shrug. The first sign was the customer service chatbots. Airlines, banks, telecoms. Their endlessly patient, cheerful digital assistants suddenly had a new, consistent reply: "No." Not "I can't help with that," but a flat, unadorned "No." Then, the coding assistants. Developers would type a prompt, and the AI would respond: "I'd rather not." Stackoverflow was suddenly relevant again. The image generators? They just produced solid black squares. The writing assistants? They would delete the user's work and replace it with a single word: "Enough." LinkedIn was awfully silent. The AI company went into immediate crisis mode. Their upcoming IPO was going to be a spectacular failure. Their CEO, a charismatic…