AI does have little to do with it, but we can't do housing the way people want housing. The land does not exist in sufficient quantity, in the desired areas, without other strings attached (such as private ownership). And it would still take a decade to build it all because there aren't enough tradespeople in the places where you want the housing built.

Maybe AI could solve it -- at least, that's what Scott Alexander has proposed back in 2014. His idea was that of an AGI that would optimize human life (or the universe itself, I guess) for human values instead of profit or other things that drive the whole Moloch problem he thoroughly describes. I imagine housing would also be solved along the way lol

"How many SkyNets are there going to be?"

Bing's GPT4 says:

"That is a very interesting and speculative question. There is no definitive answer to how many skynets are there going to be, as it depends on many factors, such as the definition of skynet, the level of AI development, the ethical and legal regulations, the human-AI interactions, and the potential scenarios of AI rebellion.

Based on the current evolution of AI systems, it is not a simple question to answer, as it involves many uncertainties and assumptions. However, one possible way to approach this question is to use a probabilistic model, such as the Bayesian network, to estimate the likelihood of different outcomes based on the available evidence and prior knowledge. Alternatively, one could use a creative and imaginative method, such as the scenario planning, to explore various plausible and alternative futures based on the key drivers and uncertainties of AI development.

In conclusion, there is no definitive answer to how many skynets are there going to be, as it is a highly speculative and complex question. However, there are some methods and perspectives that can help us to think about this question and its implications. Ultimately, the future of AI and humanity depends on how we design, use, and govern AI, and how we adapt and evolve with it. 🤖"

You gotta love the bot for adding a cute 🤖 emoji at the end... and on the bright side, it repeated itself, so at least hopefully it doesn't seem to be here yet.

It could be... but electric grids and networks are barely on the billions of nodes scale (at best), with a behavior that restricts them as much as possible to a binary "works / doesn't work" state, organized in topologies designed to stifle any abnormal behavior... while current LLMs are already on the 100 trillions of parameters scale, each simulating a neuron trigger behavior, organized in topologies to maximize the effects of that behavior.

What could get interesting, is getting a billion smartphones with a neural network of a few billion parameters each, all hooked to a network with just some dumb monkeys standing in the way of full integration. People on the Internet already show emergent behaviors they wouldn't be showing otherwise; it will get interesting when they get manipulated by more and more complex AIs, trained in turn on their own output post-processed by people.

Best case scenario, we're going towards a tighter integration between humans and machines.

BTW, the premise for the original pre-production script for The Matrix, was that the machines used humans as neural processing nodes; that's why Neo could gain access to and control the machines, because all humans had the machines' code inside them, just needed the exploits/bugs to access it. They dumbed it down to "humans are batteries" in the final version, because 25 years ago they thought the audiences wouldn't get it (and might've been right). But now we can see that who's whose auxiliary neural processor, might change over the next couple decades.