When it comes to the dilemmas posed by the singularity - and by that, I mean the singularity posed by the advent of human-like machine intelligence in any of a variety of forms - among the most naive is the Hollywood trope of "war with the machines".

It's a compelling vision for us, due to the fact that we're conditioned by thousands of years of early tribal evolution to think in terms of "us vs them". But every time this sensationalized, mediagenic concept arises, I respond that people are thinking about the conflict all wrong.

I make no bones about the likelihood that there will be a epochal conflict to play out over this technological event. We already see the initial skirmishes playing out across our global societies in terms of mere bioethics debates.

But when we frame synthetic minds in terms of the singularity, we necessarily assume that they will be our intellectual equals, if not our betters. At that level of intelligence, we can safely assume that they know at least everything that we know about managing conflict. And though we predictably conjure up conflicts in terms of full-scale war (the likes of which we've not really seen in our generation), we should realize that our alleged adversary will probably know just as much about how to run a conflict with the same tools that other "human-level" adversaries use today - diplomatic and economic forms of domination. This latter form is the one that I think calls for particularly close scrutiny, because it is the form by which most modern international conflicts are actually averted and settled. War is dumb, after all; despite its effect as a powerful, visceral, and spectacular motivator, destruction proves detrimental even to the victor, after the adrenaline high fades.

If we are to assume that machine intelligence will attempt to dominate human life, that industrial and economic dominance is overall less destructive and more beneficial to all involved (especially the hegemon), and that our adversaries will know all this, if not more, then shouldn't we expect our attempted domination to come in the form of industrial market competition conducted by machines that direct companies, instead of armies? When we reframe the conflict in this light, we benefit from a more sophisticated model that shows us that a superintelligent adversary would do better to dominate us peacefully, since it has the upper hand when it comes to cerebral finesse. Guns and bombs are the tools of overgrown tribal cavemen, not brilliant strategists. Arbiters as old as Sun Tzu have long extolled the virtues of winning without fighting.

Using such a model, however, serves to bring not just the future, but the present into a sharper, glaring focus. The idea of having a big "war" is actually a quaint anachronism; but economic struggles are intimately fought and felt by the vast majority of people on this planet, everyday in their workplaces, in their schools, or, for those least fortunate, in their work searches and poverty.

The war that we should expect from the intelligent adversaries is not one of ships, planes, guns and bombs, but of wages, jobs, resources, business models, and capital investments. This conflict is well known, and, while it is often branded as "war", it is only done so as a metaphor. We call it class war.

And once we realize that, the far-off, scifi, fantastic nature of the threat comes into clear view, directly in front of us. We realize that the conflict we imagine fighting is already being fought in the form of our economy, that the adversaries we imagine are already on the battlefield in the form of multinational corporations, and that some of the allies we imagined having are actually with the enemy, in the form of that privileged elite minority of wealthy globalist capital investors.

The word corporation derives form the Latin "corpus", meaning "body". The minds of the machines may not yet be what we imagine they will be, but I think we can say with some certainty that the bodies they inhabit already exist - and they are being sustained by the powerful, for their own enrichment, even today.

As they need not wait to fight this conflict, neither do we. Our battle is already joined to insure that technological development is applied for the good of all minds, of whatever origin or economic status. We need only to continue in our current struggle.

Comments –Nato