I was startled to listen to Joe Rogan speculating that his generation would be the last biological humans before we become merged with machines. That was on 6 October, one day before his amateur philosophical conversation with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, gained added relevance.
Altman is still fairly confident that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) will be a great overall benefit, despite the costs. Strangely, I tend to agree with him. One of my onetime science fiction group friends (deceased in 2014) maintained machines would never 'take over' from humans they would have no biological impulse to live. But that might make them ideal for a role like that traditionally allocated to a constitutional monarch, i.e., to advise and warn. How about future cyborgs each with their inbuilt adviser?
Maybe it would be too much to hope that AGI - which Altman still expects to come soon after 2030 - would be smart enough to point out when we are being stupid. As, for instance, when we have opposing 'culture wars' groups banging on about climate change and migration respectively when in fact those problems are connected. Or, when opposing groups identify themselves in terms of peace in one case and social cohesion and tradition in the other, both ignoring the fact that modern large-scale warfare is a superb disrupter of social cohesion and tradition, sometimes to the point of causing revolution. We badly need those advisers asap.