Comment by ben_w

> Apropos of TFA, if one is to believe LLMs can carve a threatening path to humanity end, how could one not see the same for our much older extant threats?

Which "much older" extant threats?

Global warming and nukes are industrial era threats. Pre-industrial threats were the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence, and death.

War and death didn't go away, but are not (and never were) extinction threats. Famine and pestilence, well, there's a reason people point the finger of blame at the Chinese government for the Great Leap Forward, and why we had lockdowns for Covid while we tested that the vaccines were safe (we went from "genome sequenced" to "first human test" in 66 days; the rest of the wait being mix of "yes but how sure are we it's safe?" tests and manufacturing at scale).

If everywhere except North Sentinel Island was wiped out, or everywhere but Hawaii, or everywhere but Greenland, humanity would be back to the level of the 1750s within a few millennia at most; and other than the North Sentinel Island example, likely even faster as books with many advanced solutions to historical problems would survive and be comprehensible.

And the problem with LLMs (and other AI) is, we're giving them control of stuff, and that stuff includes robots. The *current* versions mainly concern me for economic and cybersecurity reasons, but the tech moves fast, and the companies working on them are reckless.

My core expectation is these models will cause 1e3-1e7 deaths in a single event before people collectively actually take the risk seriously. The lower end of that is "industrial accident", the upper range includes "convinces people to go to war", and these are examples of ways current LLMs can already plausibly do wrong, given who uses them, why they use them, and how careful they are about their usage.

However, a common failure mode for people is "that was an unfortunate incident, but we studied the problem and we fixed it, it can't happen again" right before a different error they hadn't though of explodes in their faces. This is how we can get to 8e9 deaths: people keep pushing the models to do more, and keep lying to themselves that "this time we fixed all the problems, everything will work, it will be great".