My Atari can beat your... nah, forget it
As I unboxed my revamped Atari—that magical gift from the mythical gaming company to an increasingly nostalgic Generation X—a fateful thought flew by: “My world is no more.” My folks were no longer there to tell me it was enough playing and the time had come to do homework. I did not have a Sony Walkman to listen to Olivia Newton-John anymore. My watch wasn’t a Casio Calculator. I could not watch films on VHS. Of course, as any simple mind, my mind went first towards material things. Yet, when the thought passed through my entire blockhead, I realized that those material things were symbols of a freakish underbelly: “I live in the future and the future may not like me.”
Being awestruck by the technological wonders in front of us is normal. It is also normal to feel that reality has filed for divorce because we stopped paying attention. The “new Ataris” are smarter than I am and have started to develop their own values—and act on them. It is nothing like playing Asteroids, I can tell.
Source: Mazeika, et.al. “Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs.” (2025) https://www.emergent-values.ai/
Nothing prepared us—the great unwashed masses—for this brave new world. Yet there were signals. Why did we not see them? When Alan Turing asked “Can machines think?” there were thinkers who, in their own way, asked the logical questions: “Should machines think?” Wiener foresaw the disruptions that autonomous intelligent machines would create. Lucas and Dreyfus also warned that machines couldn’t and, if they could, shouldn’t replicate what they saw as the fundamental parts of thinking, i.e. consciousness, emotions, and intuition. Add Asimov to that. He is perhaps the first AI ethicist inasmuch as he added to his crispy fiction the human-centric laws of robotics. And, as a cherry on top, Weizenbaum, famous for his chatbot, called for human decision-making to be always the last word. The fear that AI would erode human responsibility turned out to be confirmed in less than 60 years.
Prometheus, Pandora’s Box, and Golem legends came even before, though. The human preoccupation with undeserved knowledge, unchecked curiosity, and creations escaping the grip of their creators is the stuff of legends. Whenever a person dares to dream, not only the feet depart from the ground but also the ability to ponder, seriously, whether the dream will turn into a nightmare. This is almost an aberration. An atrophied amygdala. That is where the center of fear as a primal survival mechanism resides. Fear is hardwired into the brain and manifests in obvious things such as heights, predators, and loud noises. Why? Because historically humans aren’t big fans of falling off a cliff, becoming the next meal of a saber tooth, or turning into a pancake under the weight of an elephant. Not happy with biology, fear is then extended to the social realm, where resilience and perseverance are spurred by fear of failure and rejection. Pavlov conditioned his dog, mind you. Why not humans?
Surely, my Atari is never going to beat your “AI –tari". But you know what? The unbridled ecstasy that such a prehistoric machine brought to my heart could never be rivaled by the technological wonders taking over our world right now. It’s a cheap consolation. A coping strategy. They all are.
