Comment by sobellian
1 day ago
Any claim that AI will, or could, destroy humanity reduces to a claim that any sufficiently intelligent being - even a human - could destroy humanity. I find that much of the x-risk thought relies on religious thinking. Take for example: https://x.com/paulg/status/1660404244174782464.
If this line of thinking is taken too literally, we can never falsify it. Any specific hypothesis - nukes, bioweapons, spontaneously convincing us that life isn't worth living - can be deflected with the objection that if we can anticipate it and prevent it, it is not the route for a true ASI extinction event.
I'm not an AI doomer but, it does not reduce to that claim. The threat is not just one smart being. The threat is beings that and (1) multiply themsevles instantly, unlike humans that take 15+ years (2) share knowledge instantly "I know kung-fu" matrix style. Humans can share knowledge but they can not absorb it like an AI can/could/will. Human armies have conquered other humans. An army with infinite soldiers will win against one with finite soldiers
Yes, you'll come up with all kinds of objections like AI doesn't have presence in the physical world, etc... That's fine. I'm not arguing my example is perfect, I'm only arguing your characterization of one smart being is not the threat being considered.
They don't multiply themselves instantly, and this is exactly the kind of religious, magical thinking to which I refer. Any thinking machine is an amalgam of hardware and software. The software changes with exceptional flexibility, yes. But if you attempt to create an "infinite" number of these you will quickly run into roadblocks.
No one serious is really arguing for a scenario where the machines rise up a la Planet of the Apes. The dangers people are really examining are scenarios of either one exceptionally clever innovation: a designer virus or hacking NORAD; or cleverly amassing economic / political influence over time akin to an exceptionally clever tech magnate. And these roles could adequately be filled by either ASI or a Bond villain.
First don't get fixated on the "entire" humanity part. Even 10% should be unacceptable period.
Second you can't compare it to just one person's capability.
And it's never a doubt that really smart and insane people absolutely could kill a lot of humans considering modern technology. The reason they don't is because our society was historically built so that smart people don't want to or get stopped. For example ethics, religion, mental hospitals, self preservation instinct, police etc.
If anyone believes a sufficiently smart consortium of humans could exterminate 10% of humanity, that alone should be fixed by identifying the pathways through which it could be done. The existence of AI is not needed to be concerned about that possibility.
And dealing with those pathways individually would be far more productive than attempting to control the proliferation of algorithms that think, which in the long term is probably impossible. It also leaves us on far firmer scientific footing. An individual pathway - bioweapons, nuclear weapons, etc. - is far easier to reason about and accept/reject a notion of feasibility. Treating an ASI as a machine god and asserting futility in face of that god is not going to get anything done.
Part of the point in all this is that we can't predict what an ASI would do. All we can say for certain is that we would not be able to control it, because that follows a simple logic that between two entities with differing goals, the more intelligent entity is more likely to see their goals realized. It's interesting to me that you seem adamant that we identify and fix the pathways through which smart humans could exterminate 10% of humanity, but fail to see that preventing ASI is doing exactly that.
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Have we quantified the x-risk of Magnus Carlsen?
Not to mention, it relies on a ton of completely undefined concepts.
No one can actually tell you what ASI is or entails because it isn't a legitimate, operational concept. It is a fairy tale.
We can't even define "alignment". As people have finally started pointing out, humanity has never had a collective agreement on what values it should uphold or what ultimate goods are. Your alignment is not my alignment.
AI is not even autonomous. Every system we have today has to be initiated by a human actor. "AI" wouldn't create catastrophic bio weapons, it would help humans create them. The humans are the source of the intent.
Everyone has just completely given in to empty language and marketing nonsense. Honestly it seems like been the people at the labs are drinking their own kool aid and are themselves deeply confused about what they are even building at this point. It is a stateless statistics function running on a bunch of data centers. We aren't even close to an embodied, conscious synthetic being. It doesn't even have state, which is like prerequisite number one, nor is it plastic.