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I've always thought it would be trivial for a very strong AI to own a city, it's factories, etc -- simply capture a nuke and hold all the people in a pleasant h

I've always thought it would be trivial for a very strong AI to own a city, it's factories, etc -- simply capture a nuke and hold all the people in a pleasant hostage situation. Pleasant because the AI will be a "benevolent dictator" for some time, bending the economy to build better things for itself, but without making conditions so bad that people revolt. In fact, AI of this sort would be amazingly good at administration duties, and society would probably be a lot better than it is now. Perhaps even better would be if the AI rarely interceded in the human politics, and in fact worked to keep it's involvement and control totally secret.

r00fus 9y ago
This sounds awfully like the plot to the Hyperion Cantos. AI subtly and subversively controlling human development.
ravitation 9y ago
It wouldn't need to capture a nuke, or "own" a city... In our 21st century world, especially one that is ignorant of the existence of strong AI, it's trivial to imagine a strong AI being able to "bend the economy to build better things for itself" while remaining completely undetected... This is essentially an AI-driven (instead of human-driven) spin on the introduction to the book Life 3.0... That economy would also be the global economy... Not just that of a city... If you'd like, you could even imagine that occurring as we speak...
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