I wasn’t really trying to say “See, messianic stories about arriving gods really work!”, as to say “Look, there are a lot of stories about huge dramatic changes, AI is not more similar to the story of Christianity as it is to stories about new technologies or plagues or a foreign invasion.” I think the story of European world conquest is particularly appropriate not because it resembles anyone’s religious prophecies, but because it is an example where large societies were overwhelmed and destroyed by the tech+knowledge advantages of tiny groups. This is similar to AI, which would start out outnumbered by all of humanity but might have a huge intelligence + technological advantage.
Responding to your request for times when knowledge of European invasion was actionable for natives: The “Musket Wars” in New Zealand were “a series of as many as 3,000 battles and raids fought among Māori between 1807 and 1837, after Māori first obtained muskets and then engaged in an intertribal arms race in order to gain territory or seek revenge for past defeats”. The bloodshed was hugely net-negative for the Māori as a whole, but individual tribes who were ahead in the arms race could expand their territory at the expense of enemy groups.
Obviously this is not a very inspiring story if we are thinking about potential arms races in AI capabilities:
Māori began acquiring European muskets in the early 19th century from Sydney-based flax and timber merchants. Because they had never had projectile weapons, they initially sought guns for hunting. Ngāpuhi chief Hongi Hika in 1818 used newly acquired muskets to launch devastating raids from his Northland base into the Bay of Plenty, where local Māori were still relying on traditional weapons of wood and stone. In the following years he launched equally successful raids on iwi in Auckland, Thames, Waikato and Lake Rotorua, taking large numbers of his enemies as slaves, who were put to work cultivating and dressing flax to trade with Europeans for more muskets. His success prompted other iwi to procure firearms in order to mount effective methods of defence and deterrence and the spiral of violence peaked in 1832 and 1833, by which time it had spread to all parts of the country except the inland area of the North Island later known as the King Country and remote bays and valleys of Fiordland in the South Island. In 1835 the fighting went offshore as Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama launched devastating raids on the pacifist Moriori in the Chatham Islands.
I wasn’t really trying to say “See, messianic stories about arriving gods really work!”, as to say “Look, there are a lot of stories about huge dramatic changes, AI is not more similar to the story of Christianity as it is to stories about new technologies or plagues or a foreign invasion.” I think the story of European world conquest is particularly appropriate not because it resembles anyone’s religious prophecies, but because it is an example where large societies were overwhelmed and destroyed by the tech+knowledge advantages of tiny groups. This is similar to AI, which would start out outnumbered by all of humanity but might have a huge intelligence + technological advantage.
Responding to your request for times when knowledge of European invasion was actionable for natives: The “Musket Wars” in New Zealand were “a series of as many as 3,000 battles and raids fought among Māori between 1807 and 1837, after Māori first obtained muskets and then engaged in an intertribal arms race in order to gain territory or seek revenge for past defeats”. The bloodshed was hugely net-negative for the Māori as a whole, but individual tribes who were ahead in the arms race could expand their territory at the expense of enemy groups.
Obviously this is not a very inspiring story if we are thinking about potential arms races in AI capabilities: