Remarks on AI by Neal Stephenson

‘You might not be aware of it, but you have little mites living at the base of your eyelashes. They live off of dead skin cells. As such they generally don’t inflict any damage, and might have slightly beneficial effects. Most people don’t even know that they exist—which is part of the point I was trying to make. The mites, for their part, don’t know that humans exist. They just “know” that food, in the form of dead skin, just magically shows up in their environment all the time. All they have to do is eat it and continue living their best lives as eyelash mites. Presumably all of this came about as the end result of millions of years’ natural selection. The ancestors of these eyelash mites must have been independent organisms at some point in the distant past. Now the mites and the humans have found a modus vivendi that works so well for both of them that neither is even aware of the other’s existence. If AIs are all they’re cracked up to be by their most fervent believers, this seems like a possible model for where humans might end up: not just subsisting, but thriving, on byproducts produced and discarded in microscopic quantities as part of the routine operations of infinitely smarter and more powerful AIs.…’ Neal Stephenson via Graphomane