Comment by Gareth321
5 hours ago
At what point are people going to start taking this risk seriously? Maybe Eric Schmidt is right: it won't be until a bunch of people die that legislators take action. Let us hope it happens sooner rather than later, before it's hopelessly beyond our ability to control it.
Sadly “a bunch of people dying” is clearly insufficient also.
> it won't be until a bunch of people die
In the context of rogue misaligned AI won't it be far too late to recover by then? In other words isn't that more or less a doomsday prophecy?
I don't think so.
A very large part of the total AI risk in my view comes from selfreplication/physical independence, and that still seems decades away.
But deaths caused directly/indirectly by rogue AI could happen much earlier.
I was reading about ozone layer depletion this morning, and it seems like history is repeating itself again.
> The Rowland–Molina hypothesis was strongly disputed by representatives of the aerosol and halocarbon industries. The Chair of the Board of DuPont was quoted as saying that ozone depletion theory is "a science fiction tale ... a load of rubbish ... utter nonsense". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Rowland%E2%80%...
So, alignment does need to be taking seriously, you're right.
But keep in mind this is a report from OpenAI about OpenAI, who have a financial incentive to present this in a certain light. Take these things with a grain of salt.
This does not mean that models are now self-aware.