Comment by aesthesia
1 day ago
The inference is more like "people place sufficient amounts of infrastructure under direct control of a sufficiently capable AI" -> "there is no way to ensure that humans will actually be able to shut down the AI". My claim is not that this inevitably means that the AI will resist shutdown, or that it will inevitably take harmful actions, just that there is a nonnegligible chance that it could. The downside is large enough that even a relatively small chance is something to be worried about.
You can’t just say “well, the downside is big, I don’t have to provide good evidence for my side of the argument.” Because I can just as easily say, “the upside is big, …”. And the upside is big, after all, AI can do all the shitty jobs for us and humanity achieves the utopia it’s been chasing for eons.
I think it's a good idea, when considering changes of this magnitude, to make an affirmative safety case for them rather than just saying "eh, I can't think of any way this could possibly go wrong."