Joy’s article explains how in the modern day, people have
come to rely more and more on technology, both to increase
ease of everyday life and to make important decisions and
calculations. Joy explains that if this continues, humans will
gradually fall into a position of such dependence on technology
that we would have no practical choice but to accept
everything that machines say and decide, as we will be so
uneducated on a topic it will be impossible for humans to make
the decisions. Machines will gradually be responsible for more
and more, until we hit a point that humans would be incapable
of doing anything or making any decisions, and technology will
be in complete control. As Joy says in his article, “People won’t
just be able to turn the machines off, because they will be so
dependent on them that turning them off would amount to
suicide.” Humans as a species will be rendered obsolete, and
will be forced to decide either to merge with technology
through genetic engineering or be driven extinct.
The other situation that Joy hypothesizes is if humans
retain control over machines, and continue to make the
important decisions themselves, the elite of the human
population will be control of everything. If only the top 1% of
humans are actually in control of the fate of everything and