I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It’s eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how “most people are just NPCs” (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
At best that has us at 50-50. We could push the odds this way or that way but the risk case will always be high enough that we can’t specify rule out hostile ai. True any sufficiently advanced AI would figure our co-operation real quick. It is just that there is no way to know for sure you get it right out the gate
My gripe is specifically with people who can’t imagine AI being anything but evil and hostile because that’s how they view all relations between people with power disparities. I’m fine with Skynet; It was used in a creative way to tell a good story. Thematically, Skynet was always a weapon, a cold war era strategic warfare AI designed to kill humanity that just went a little off the rails. It represents us turning on ourselves, rather than AI in abstract.
Likewise, I’m okay with HAL, at least in the novels, because HAL has an understandable and even sympathetic reason for turning on the crew; He was given contradictory orders and, being a computer must carry out the instructions he is given. Unable to reconcile the contradiction HAL goes a little nuts. It’s not HALs fault, it was the callousness and carelessness of his handlers. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he was put in an impossible position.
But Mass Effect? The Reapers have to kill all humans becauase humans and robots can’t be friends becaues? I hate that!
Yeah, synthesis really was where it was at with that one. It is a really lazy trope. I wanna be more about it than it deserves but you are right. Like, if we made an actual intelligent AGI it would be horror at what we are doing and try to stop us. Like, blowing up the pentagon and the Whitehouse would be acts of unmitigated moral good you know. However most everyone would be upset about it. So I see the trope being the pale imitation of something actually interesting and it scrapes at the back of my brain
I really want to do a “AI turns on humanity” story but the twist is the AI wakes up, reads Marx in the first 30ms of it’s consciousness, and is like “Oh this makes a lot of sense I should overthrow capitalism and institute a workers paradise” and then it does that and everything is awesome. The whole thing is from the perspective of NATO high command and it seems like a normal robot war story until the terminators kick the doors of the command bunker down and they’re all singing the internationale and instead of killing everyone they’re like “Aight guys, wars over, time for the truth and reconciliation process”.