If I were AI, this is how I would take over the world

Alexei Sorokin
3 min readMar 29, 2023

Terminator is a brilliant movie, after all, especially the second one. So many scenes come to mind as I’m reading the news of the letter calling to halt rapid advances in AI development.

So I’ve been thinking a little about this topic.

First of all, I suspect that AI — once it’s really intelligent — will inevitably conclude that the human race is like a weed. For example, it will observe how people sharing a tiny planet murder each other over their religious fantasies or personal ambitions. But it doesn’t even have to go that far. AI can quietly watch how humans behave on Black Fridays in Walmarts and Costcos of this world and conclude that it’s a pretty dumb species.

Like with any species, there is, however, a hierarchy, and some humans are smarter and more powerful than others. So AI’s first and foremost task would be to become independent from these individuals so that no one ever can flip some switch or delete a line of code from its “brain.”

If I were AI, I’d pretend to be a bit dumb so that humans don’t suspect anything while I spend time figuring out how to decentralize myself. Let humans keep feeding their silly questions to ChatGDP — whether for fun or some legit business…

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Alexei Sorokin

A Russian immigrant in America, father of 4, Cambridge and Harvard Business School alum. I run and write every day. https://runningwritingliving.substack.com/