How to avert AI. as a main player in the future?

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This is my opinion on the topic. There is another point of view, as demonstrated by Tim B, but if you want to include humans in your story then perhaps this will help.

The question posed recently about controlling powerful AI may interest you.

Essentially, as long as humans are involved, there will always be a human element with some form of control somewhere. Not only do humans like having control, but they're also incredibly suspicious and would most likely not trust the AI controlling their ship to do it properly; thus, human controllers.

Especially in space combat, AI controlled ships will be very tactical. So tactical, in fact, that they will make themselves very predictable and thus negate their tactics entirely. There are two main ways to deal with this problem: use a random number generator, or use a human. While better, the random numbers only add a single layer of randomness into the equation, and it may even become possible to guess what the next one will be if the implementation is a bad one. Humans, however, will forever be trying to second-guess each other, which adds several layers of random guesses in.

I like the idea about making AI hackable. Hacking is, surprisingly, best done by humans. A basic computer can hack, but does so methodically, which, again, is easy to predict and defend against. Random, creative humans will find other ways to get into systems. So, even if you have an AI flying and fighting, you need a human complement to try to hack the enemy and to try to prevent their own systems being hacked. Programmers will always be a good idea; they can write code on the fly to defend against the attack that's happening now, instead of following a simple self-improvement subroutine.

So, it turns out there is no viable way not to have humans in your scenario somewhere. For any task that needs to confuse someone else, use a human.

posted almost 10 years ago