Aliens Already Among Us
Artificial Intelligence has already taken over, but it's not what you think. Just open your eyes and look around.
There is a profound difference between artificial intelligence and synthetic consciousness. Intelligence does not necessarily imply volition or motives and consciousness does not necessarily imply intelligence. Today's AI accomplishments may seem impressive—and they are—but so did the steam engine yet we still have human sports even though the feeblest mechanical devices can outrun, outthrow, and otherwise outperform humans. Seeing as how we don't yet have even a working definition of intelligence or consciousness I think that we are at the level of monks arguing about angels on pins insofar as where we currently stand in these endeavours. Even so, over a very long and convoluted history that discussion did lead to the science and technology that we have today. It's important to actually understand what one is talking about and to put it into perspective, otherwise it is just jibber-jabber.
I think that part of the problem is that we have focused so much on the "intelligence" aspect and not so much on the "consciousness" aspect. They are not the same. Although we have modeled certain aspects of intelligence we have yet to answer even the most basic questions about consciousness. We have yet to come up with any kind of test to determine if something (or someone) is actually conscious! We have not a single working definition of it!
For anyone interested, I would recommend reading Daniel C. Dennet's "Consciousness Explained" as well as "The Tree of Knowledge - The Biological Roots of Human Understanding" by Humberto R. Maturana & Francisco J. Varela. For a more technical discussion based on a philosophical background go find a copy of very excellent "Understanding Computers and Cognition" by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. All of these are somewhat dated today but a good place to start if you want to really start to understand even what the issues are.
Speaking of Fernando Flores, he was the finance minister of Chile during the time of Salvador Allende and after years of torture under Pinochet has gone on to do much in this area. To read a first hand account of the political ramifications of applying what was then called cybernetics to the running of a country (which Allende was attempting to do) get a copy of "Brain of the Firm" by Stafford Beer, the British cybernetician, if you can still find it. Very dry and very technically thorough but later editions included quite of bit of personal detail of the true story of early AI coming up against the powers that be in the world at the time. Perhaps something for our time as well.
I have no doubt that AI's may one day be indistinguishable from conscious volitional entities complete with human-style emotions but we are far from that today. Whether they would be really conscious and actually experiencing emotions and presence or merely mimicking the motions is up to philosophers to decide and may turn out to be a meaningless question obscuring more interesting insights. I remember watching many people get pulled into deep lengthy conversations with the software called "Eliza" back in the 1970's and Eliza was incredibly simplistic. What we should be realizing is how utterly simplistic human interactions actually are and how easily we are fooled. We should learn from that. Our modern world already has sophisticated free AI's that have us under their thrall without us even paying much attention. They are called corporations and they run on the complex hardware comprised of hundreds and thousands of human brains augmented by our computers and communication networks. For us to actually determine what they are up to is akin to an ant trying to figure out what its ant colony is up to.