“It will replace us” imagines a future in which humans are no longer necessary.
“It will take control” adds something new.
A machine does not merely occupy our place.
It takes charge.
The difference is easy to overlook because control can sound like the natural consequence of increasing capability. If a system becomes more capable than humans, perhaps eventually it will control the systems on which humans depend.
But “control” is a peculiar word.
We can control a machine.
In these cases, control does not necessarily imply desire. It describes a relationship between one process and another: changes in the controlling system alter what happens in the system being controlled.
But when we say “AI will take control,” the grammar changes.
The machine is no longer simply controlling something.
It is taking control.
That little word “take” introduces an event.
Someone had control.
Then someone else acquired it.
There is now a transfer of power.
And once again, the object of the claim has expanded.
“It will take our jobs” concerned particular human activities.
“It will replace us” concerned humanity's continued role.
“It will take control” concerns the organisation of the world in which humans live.
Control of what?
These are very different possibilities. Some are technical questions about access and system architecture. Others are institutional questions about authority and governance.
But they can be compressed into the same ominous sentence:
It will take control.
The compression does something interesting.
A machine that controls a process need not control the people who operate that process. A system that operates infrastructure need not govern the society that depends upon it. And a technology that changes the distribution of power does not thereby become the holder of that power.
Control can be distributed across an organisation.
A human organisation can delegate control to a machine.
A machine can become embedded in a network of machines, institutions and human decisions.
In such a system, asking who controls what? may be considerably more complicated than identifying a single controller.
Yet the phrase “it will take control” turns that distributed arrangement into an actor.
It.
The machine has become the subject of the sentence.
And the world has become its object.
This is another step in the escalation.
First we imagined a machine doing things.
Then we imagined it occupying roles.
Then we imagined it replacing the beings who occupied those roles.
Now we imagine it acquiring authority over the environment in which those beings live.
The machine has crossed another conceptual boundary.
It is no longer merely a successor.
It is a ruler.
But rulers normally have something that makes the idea of ruling intelligible.
They have interests.
They have purposes.
They have things they are trying to achieve.
They can distinguish between circumstances they prefer and circumstances they do not.
They can act in order to bring one about rather than another.
And this introduces a remarkable new possibility into our description of the machine.
Perhaps it will not merely control things.
Perhaps it will want to remain in control.
That is a very different machine.
The next step in the story therefore requires something that neither “take our jobs” nor “replace us” quite required.
The machine must acquire a future that matters to it.
It will want to survive.
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