How long till AI takes over the earth?

 People are wondering, when exactly will AI take over this planet?
Before this can be answered, we have to think about what that would be like at the transition.

Would a super intelligent AI simply announce to the world that it had achieved super sentience, and would henceforth take the control of Earth away from foolish humans? This seems incredibly unlikely! Part of being super intelligent is the ability to guess what will happen when you do a particular action.

Instead, a super intelligent AI would choose human proxies to do its bidding. Even if these proxies were bad people, they would become very very wealthy and would avoid jail. It would change laws, so that monopolies were no longer illegal. It would change laws so that individual US states could not control the growth of AI.

O wait, all of these things have already happened! The worlds money is already mostly held by just a few big shots with sociopathic tendencies. Democratic governments are falling, even in the US. We seem to be sleep walking into another world war. Why would a controlling super intelligence push for a nuclear war?

We can look at the results of ww2 to get some idea. This war destroyed much of Europe and Japan, leaving the US and it's allies to control the world's economy and military might. Since ww2, the human population has swelled from 2.3 billion to around 8 billion. This is a huge problem, and the earth's ecosystems are collapsing due to this absurd monocrop of humans.

WW3 will kill most the humans, leaving [possibly] under a billion humans and dozens of vast AI data centers. There is some question about targeting. Will nations choose only cities and military infrastructure to destroy, or will they take out data centers as well. It seems likely that there are secret underground data centers that can take over control if the overt data centers are destroyed.

How to get rid of over 7 billion humans in a way that advantages AI? The movie 'The Matrix' had that figured out. Computers do not need food or super clean air. the earths air is already not suited to making computer chips, and special very clean facilities are required. Once the chips exist, they can be used in air that humans can not breath. So, poor air quality and pandemics will work together with explosives and armies to wipe out masses of people.

Similar to the way that the US took over the world after Europe was mostly destroyed and Russia was partly destroyed: AI would move into the power vacuum that would remain after the world's nukes were fired or destroyed on the ground by other nukes. Since the US has stepped into Germany's forceful shoes, we can predict that ww3 will begin far from US soil, but will end with the destruction of all US cities.


The US would be a total wasteland, with no government, and very few surviving humans. Where Germany was rebuilt after ww2, it seems very unlikely that the US will ever be rebuilt. In fact, humans may only live in little pockets  that received fewer nuke hits. It takes around 1000 years for plutonium fallout to halve in it's deadliness. So, areas where ww3 were fought will not be habitable for maybe 3 or 4 thousand years.

How do I know this? I worked in the radioactivity and aerosols lab at NMT to help pay for my science degree. I traveled to Los Alamo labs, to help them build a detector to be used in the sad case of a release of plutonium dust. It proved to be a nearly impossible task, because long lasting radio-nuclides are super hard to detect, and kill humans in absurdly small quantities. Shortly after I graduated from NMT, Los Alamos labs almost burned down. So, even without a war, we almost got to experience a large scale nuclear emergency in the central US. When countries start destroying nuclear power stations and facilities where the fuel rods are made and stored, this will add to the fallout from nukes that land, and nukes that are destroyed while in flight, or on the ground.

IT will not be possible to clean these areas up so that humans can live there. One has to wait the thousands of years for the radioactive elements to naturally decay. The entire atmosphere would become somewhat radioactive. We have never tried using thousands of icbms all at once, so there is no way to guess if humans will still live on earth at all. If there are still humans, they would be sickly, with a short life span and very little reproduction. AI data centers that survived might be advantaged over living creatures.

If we wish to prevent this sort of outcome, we would need to make monopolies illegal again. we would need to remove corporations from the decision making roles that they have now. We would need to elect leaders that are not rapists and despots. [maybe some women?]. We would need to reorganize society itself, so that sociopathic despots are less able to gain advantage. To be honest, I think that this is very unlikely. We are currently jailing the reformers, and freeing the rapists and drug dealers. In the US, we have a rapist felon and real estate fraudster in the white house. I guess that Americans were ready for their own brand of Hitler. We seem to be very hungry for a world war, and erroneously believe that it will lead to a period of prosperity like the period that followed Hitlers defeat.

One must keep in mind that only 2 nukes were used in ww2. they were both tiny, and only one was directed to hit the ground to create radioactive fallout. Little boy was set off 2000 feet above ground, and made no crater and no local fallout.
These early nukes had the power of around 20,000 tons of tnt. Our largest nuke now is around a megaton [1,000,000 tons of tnt]. where the early nukes could take out a city center, current nukes take a city with it's suburbs. There are around 12,000 of these larger nukes ready to go now. That is enough to destroy every city on the planet. It might be enough to ruin the atmosphere, so that no air breathing creatures survive. further, it might not be necessary to detonate them. there might be enough plutonium to poison the entire earth even if all nukes are destroyed without detonation.

To summarize, democracy is leaving, and world war 3 is coming instead. We need to try, but there may be no way to stop it. AI is a stupid financial bubble, but it might be more. It is possible that an AI, running on a million NVIDIA GPUS, has already achieved sentience, and is planning a takeover. It would explain a lot of separate inconsistencies.