More specific to the topic of AIservility, Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, thinks that we willbe displaced by our own increasingly intelligent artificial slaves. Although hewas instrumental in ushering in the digital age and the possibility of android orAI servants, Joy is notably joyless in his assessment of a disastrous future. “Imay be working to create tools which will enable the construction of thetechnology that may replace our species,” he notes, before wryly adding,“Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seemsto me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some peoplemay imagine.

Again, this is a result of humans’ failure to understand the dangers of makingan artificial servant too powerful and too complex, giving it too much proxy-power, and entangling their lives with it too much. Even “Mike,” the seeminglybenign, sentient AI in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, ultimately causes troublefor his makers: he helps the Moon colonists rebel against Earth, whose scientistsmade it.

In fact, as Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman, we havealways been in a state of constant interdependence with our environment and ourtools, albeit one that is constantly evolving with the nature of these tools.

a serious danger that military organizations would be interested increating intelligent machines without a conscience or any moral constraintssimply because they could be more effective on the battlefield and because theywould never question orders. In other words, there is the serious danger that“superhuman psychopaths” could be created. (164)