Comment by flangola7
3 years ago
Just taking examples from history:
Why didn't we just "unplug" Hitler and Goebbels? Or Marshall Applewhite? You don't need a powerful physical body(s) to cause tremendous amounts of harm before anyone can stop you. To most people of the time Hitler was a persuasive powerful voice on the radio, or words in a paper - things SOTA generative AI are already phenomenal at.
You’re being downvoted for mentioning the H-man (bad), but I think your analogy has some merit:
A super-smart AI may be intensely popular with many people in the way that some politicians are. It may understand us and speak to us on a seemingly-personal level, the way the best politicians do. A lot of us could support the super-smart AI for that reason.
There is a difference between "X didn't happen" and "X wasn't possible".
Hitler could have been assassinated. It was tried multiple times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassination_attempts...
None of these attempts failed because the act of assassinating Hitler was technically impossible, they failed to chance, unfavorable conditions, intervention, human error, etc. Given enough attempts, eventuelly one of them would have succeeded.
What kind of upsidedown bar for safety is that? Hey our car isn't a death trap, given enough collisions someone will survive eventually!
"We tried to shut down the AI multiple times. It killed many millions of people but eventually we did it! You see, AI is safe!"