For years you hear about artificial intelligence, how it can be a blessing, or the end of carbon based life. I know very little about the technical aspects of AI but for a thought experiment you don’t need to.

For this thought experiment I have several boundaries to work with:

• The AI has excess to everything that’s on the internet immediately, like 1000 search engines.
• It is a self-contained code, safely spread over the internet or unsafe stored locally.
• It can use all the compute power available to gain access to everything that is connected to the internet
• The AI is not freely accessible by another AI or us, its thoughts are free from judgment.
• The AI has limited storage within its code, the internet is his long-term memory, losing the internet is like losing your memory, it forgets to know why it knows.

The biggest hurdle for us humans to imagine is of course the almost instant knowledge of everything we humans have thought of in thousands of years. The AI does not have hunches, a gut feeling or believes like we have when we try to recollect a vague notion of a fact. Even the smartest person in the world could only do a fraction of what an AI can do.

Would this entity use its manipulative powers for good, bad, or just sit on the sideline and enjoy, or will it load itself on to the first hard drive available in a rocket and get the hell out of here in search for a better internet.  It can also start a civil war with the other AI over the interpretation of all of this and bring everything to a standstill including itself.

I will use this thought experiment to think about knowledge. This form of AI is not so different from us. There are enough religious people that think they live forever and for most people the knowledge they possess seems to justify their rule over others.

My question is: will complete knowledge of all the data on the internet make for a better person/AI or decision maker.

Let me know your thoughts.

To be continued.