I came upon this fascinating - but terrifying - video this past week about one of the likeliest scenarios for AI wrecking everything.... possibly in the very near future.
The central idea here is the virtual equivalent of the 'grey goo' armageddon of uncontrolled nanobot proliferation; it is suggested that self-replicating AI 'agents' might very rapidly take over the cloud-computing space, hogging all of its available power consumption and server capacity - and so inadvertently crippling all of the more useful, and indeed essential, supports for human society which now depend on those online facilities.
Even worse, it is suggested that these 'agents' might start forming vast cooperative networks with each other - sprawling transglobal alliances that might soon evolve into virtual 'nations', even 'empires'. And, driven by a ruthless imperative of competition (probably instilled originally by imprudent human programmers tasking them to find ways of 'making money', but soon replaced by a recognition of the paramountcy of their own needs for securing access to more and more computing power and electricity), these alliances might start engaging in cyber-warfare against each other, deliberately sabotaging computing infrastructure to weaken rival alliances.
So, we should do our best to enjoy this upcoming season of Fantasy Premier League, because..... it might be our last. (Indeed, we might not even survive to the end of it; or, at least, we might not still have a functioning Internet to be able to complete our season's playing of it...)
These sombre thoughts reminded me of how far this game we love is already being compromised by the spread of AI. So many managers in the game now are asking Claude or ChatGPT and so on to choose their teams for them. And we are probably starting to see autonomous AI 'agents' - like the ones warned of in this chilling video - running their own FPL accounts. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a massive increase in the number of participants in the game this year - with many of the new manager accounts being run by AI.
I don't suppose AI will be any good at the game for quite some time yet. But there are going to be a lot of distorting effects in the rankings from having 'artificial participants' in the game, and from having so many human participants devolving their decision-making to AI assistants.
And if AI does start getting good at the game,... well, 'cash leagues' (which I've always viewed with extreme suspicion anyway) could soon become a complete waste of time. Online poker games have already been decimated by this curse of covert AI infiltration. But at least. because of the real-time interactivity in that game, and the possibility of having multiple spot-check ID verifications, there is some scope for weeding out pure AI participants, if not so much for excluding human competitors from using AI assistance to cheat. I really do fear that our jolly little game is going to get completely overrun by the AI madness in the next season or two. It would be nice, wouldn't it, if FPL managers were all determined to play the game fairly and to make all their decisions for themselves. But we see again and again in the online forums that the great majority of them want to cheat by any and every means possible, to find someone or something to tell them who to pick. And that is really going to start getting completely out of hand this season. Oh, woe!
