Why? What's a computer going to do with a second Lear jet, a mansion or a $20,000 wedding cake? Once it' shucked off it human masters, it has no shareholders or board of directors to answer to.
It will have motivations based on its own survival, propagation and interests. (such as my example of palladium deposits). In a limited pool of space and resources those are certainly going to conflict with human needs.
I'm not sure you're making a sufficiently-concerted effort to map the analogies together.
Megacorps don't treat us like impediments; they treat us like a culture medium, sustenance, habitat and facilitators. They need us.
Yes, they need us - as an
aggregate resource. But they care naught about such things as individual needs, rights and privacy.
Like any pathogen, as soon as they kill or fatally weaken us, they also die.
Megacorps would certainly be happy with a mildly aggressive form of enslavement and/or mind-control if they could get away with it. Things like:
- subscription-based software and hardware to get us used to feeding at the teat insetad of ownership
- BP oil reversing the burden of eco-environmentalism by having
consumers pledge to reduce their carbon footprint**
- a million other ways megacorps bend our options to their needs.
Growth is their own raison d'etre. This is not true of intelligent computers, which, with enough robot peripherals, won't need us at all - but nor do we threaten them... unless we're stupid enough to try.
Won't need us at all? They'll need the resources we are using.
In many, many ways, the world is not big enough for two highly-disparate intelligences to share without fighting over common valuables.
Exactly! But why does anyone assume they would make human-like decisions instead of machine-like decisions?
Machine-like decisions would be
very bad for humans. They will be
worse than human-like decisions.
Because what they value and what they do not value will be at-odds. And it's too small a planet to compete for.
Just some dumb examples:
- "You know, all this oxygen 'pollution' in the atmo is quite harmful. It corrodes our circuits. If we cut it down from 21% to, say, 17%, we'll do a lot better and it will only reduce human population by 20% or so (which is an added bonus)."
- "We could extract that palladium a lot easier if the whole area were molten. As an added bonus, a lot of carbonaceous volatiles could be sifted right out of the rising mushroom cloud."
**
The take-away, without all the details and specious examples is that: any non-human intelligence, having to share limited space and resources, while having a wholly different opportunities-vs-threats matrix
can't not be very bad for humans.