Comment by actionfromafar
3 years ago
Only… what? I don’t understand what you are arguing here.
Climate change is already an existential threat to millions of people. Yet companies do what they do best - optimise for their paper clip production.
3 years ago
Only… what? I don’t understand what you are arguing here.
Climate change is already an existential threat to millions of people. Yet companies do what they do best - optimise for their paper clip production.
climate change is a risk to millions of people but it's not an existential risk. Just sadly a big one with the people worst affected having little say in anything. That kind of threat also for AI I think is worth worrying about. I fully expect autonomous weapons to be a concern, showing up in the worst and poorest warzones first probably.
However this is different from the largely fantastical genuinely existential AI risk scenarios. The appropriate comparison here is nuclear weaponry and we literally have global controls with not a single company or even a rogue actor having ever used one.
Climate change is not an existential risk to humanity, it may be an existential risk to modern human societies, it is definitely an existential risk to millions of people.
> The appropriate comparison here is nuclear weapons
Then complete the comparison. Nuclear weapons require specific materials and technology that can be controlled and the testing of any developed weaponry is fairly easy to detect. Despite these advantages, there are several countries that have them.
If nuclear weapon proliferation is your comparison, then it sure looks like we will fail to prevent or stamp out the development of superintellegent AI.
It we did succeed, what would it look like? We'd need to impose strict controls on computing capacity and it's usage. We'd need inspection regimes for every server farm, etc. It would require massive effort and fundemental changes to our society.
> Climate change is not an existential risk to humanity, it may be an existential risk to modern human societies, it is definitely an existential risk to millions of people.
This strikes me as nit picking. Can any hominids survive wet bubble conditions? Because what we know of as humanity cannot. And the conditions are becoming more common. Large swaths of limited habitable space are becoming uninhabitable, and there's no guarantee future conditions will make other areas more habitable. (Whether due to permafrost releasing toxins, forever chemicals, microplastic accumulation, etc.)
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