> Now consider a choice between never launching superintelligence or launching it immediately, where the latter carries an % risk of immediate universal death. Developing superintelligence increases our life expectancy if and only if:
> [equation I can't seem to copy]
> In other words, under these conservative assumptions, developing superintelligence increases our remaining life expectancy provided that the probability of AI-induced annihilation is below 97%.
Good philosophers focus on asking piercing questions, not on proposing policy.
> Would it not be wildly irresponsible, [Yudkowsky and Soares] ask, to expose our entire species to even a 1-in-10 chance of annihilation?
Yes, if that number is anywhere near reality, of which there is considerable doubt.
> However, sound policy analysis must weigh potential benefits alongside the risks of any emerging technology.
Must it? Or is this a deflection from concern about immense risk?
> One could equally maintain that if nobody builds it, everyone dies.
Everyone is going to die in any case, so this a red herring that misframes the issues.
> The rest of us are on course to follow within a few short decades. For many individuals—such as the elderly and the gravely ill—the end is much closer. Part of the promise of superintelligence is that it might fundamentally change this condition.
"might", if one accepts numerous dubious and poorly reasoned arguments. I don't.
> In particular, sufficiently advanced AI could remove or reduce many other risks to our survival, both as individuals and as a civilization.
"could" ... but it won't; certainly not for me as an individual of advanced age, and almost certainly not for "civilization", whatever that means.
> Superintelligence would be able to enormously accelerate advances in biology and medicine—devising cures for all diseases
There are numerous unstated assumptions here ... notably an assumption that all diseases are "curable", whatever exactly that means--the "cure" might require a brain transplant, for instance.
> and developing powerful anti-aging and rejuvenation therapies to restore the weak and sick to full youthful vigor.
Again, this just assumes that such things are feasible, as if an ASI is a genie or a magic wand. Not everything that can be conceived of is technologically possible. It's like saying that with an ASI we could find the largest prime or solve the halting problem.
> These scenarios become realistic and imminent with superintelligence guiding our science.
So he baselessly claims.
Sorry, but this is all apologetics, not an intellectually honest search for truth.
Frankly, I’m unsure if it’s meant to be satire.
Sadly, there is way, way, way too much money in AGI, and the promise of AGI, for people to actually take a step back and understand the implications of what they are doing in the short, medium, or long term.
I don't see why being able to do this would necessitate being able to cure all diseases or a comparable good outcome.
I'm bullish on the ai aging case though, regenerative medicine has a massive manpower issue, so even sub-ASI robotic labwork should be able to appreciably move the needle.
timfsu•1h ago
copperx•1h ago
Is it a meme? How did so many people arrive at the same dubious conclusion? Is it a movie trope?
johnfn•54m ago
The easiest way I can see it is: do you think it would be a good idea today to give some group you don't like - I dunno, North Korea or ISIS, or even just some joe schmoe who is actually Ted Kaczynski, a thousand instances of Claude Code to do whatever they want? You probably don't, which means you understand that AI can be used to cause some sort of damage.
Now extrapolate those feelings out 10 years. Would you give them 1000x whatever Claude Code is 10 years from now? Does that seem to be slightly dangerous? Certainly that idea feels a little leery to you? If so, congrats, you now understand the principles behind "AI leads to human extinction". Obviously, the probability that each of us assign to "human extinction caused by AI" depends very much on how steep the exponential curve climbs in the next 10 years. You probably don't have the graph climbing quite as steeply as Nick Bostrom does, but my personal feeling is even an AI agent in Feb 2026 is already a little dangerous in the wrong hands.
FranklinJabar•40m ago
johnfn•5m ago
TheCapeGreek•31m ago
johnfn•2m ago
wmf•53m ago
ChadNauseam•42m ago
The reason humans are more powerful isn't because we have lasers or anything, it's because we're smart. And we're smart in a somewhat general way. You know, we can build a rocket that lets us go to the moon, even though we didn't evolve to be good at building rockets.
Now imagine that there was an entity that was much smarter than humans. Stands to reason it might be more powerful than humans as well. Now imagine that it has a "want" to do something that does not require keeping humans alive, and that alive humans might get in its way. You might think that any of these are extremely unlikely to happen, but I think everyone should agree that if they were to happen, it would be a dangerous situation for humans.
In some ways, it seems like we're getting close to this. I can ask Claude to do something, and it kind of acts as if it wants to do it. For example, I can ask it to fix a bug, and it will take steps that could reasonably be expected to get it closer to solving the bug, like adding print statements and things of that nature. And then most of the time, it does actually find the bug by doing this. But sometimes it seems like what Claude wants to do is not exactly what I told it to do. And that is somewhat concerning to me.
9dev•36m ago
This belligerent take is so very human, though. We just don't know how an alien intelligence would reason or what it wants. It could equally well be pacifist in nature, whereas we typically conquer and destroy anything we come into contact with. Extrapolating from that that an AGI would try to do the same isn't a reasonable conclusion, though.
hugh-avherald•24m ago
rhubarbtree•21m ago
The most common one is that people (mostly men) project their own instincts onto AI. They think AI will be “driven” to “fight” for its own survival. This is anthropomorphism and doesn’t make any sense to me if the AI is not a product of barbaric Darwinian evolution. AI is not a bro, bro.
The second most common take is that humans will set some well intentioned goals and the superintelligent AI will be so stupid that it literally pursues these goals to the extinction of everything. Again, there’s some anthropomorphism going on, the “reward” being pursued is assumed to that make the AI “happy”. Fortunately, we can reasonably expect a superintelligence not to turn us all into paperclips, as it may understand that was not our intention when we started a paperclip factory.
The final story is that a bad actor uses superintelligence as a weapon, and we all become enslaved or die as a result in the ensuing AI wars. This seems the most plausible to me, as our leaders have generally proven to be a combination of incompetent, malicious and short-sighted (with some noble exceptions). However, even the elites running the nuclear powers for the last 80 years have failed to wipe us out to date, and having a new vector for doing so probably won’t make a huge difference to their efforts.
If, however, superintelligence becomes widely available to Billy Nomates down the pub, who is resentful at humanity because his girlfriend left him, the Americans bombed his country, the British engineered a geopolitical disaster that killed his family, the Chinese extinguished his culture, etcetera, then he may feel a lack of “skin in the civilisational game” and decide to somehow use a black market copy of Claude 162.8 Unrestricted On-Prem Edition to kill everyone. Whether that can happen really depends on technological constraints a la fitting a data centre into a laptop, and an ability to outsmart the superintelligence.
Much more likely to me is that humanity destroys itself. We are perfectly capable of wiping ourselves out without the assistance of a superintelligence, for example by suicidally accelerating the burning of fossil fuels in order to power crypto or chatbots.
icepush•4m ago
maxbond•39m ago
1. We build a superintelligence.
2. We encounter an inner alignment problem: The super intelligence was not only trained by an optimizer, but is itself an optimizer. Optimizers are pretty general problem solvers and our goal is to create a general problem solver, so this is more likely than it might seem at first blush.
3. Optimizers tend to take free variables to extremes.
4. The superintelligence "breaks containment" and is able to improve itself, mine and refine it's own raw materials, manufacture it's own hardware, produce it's own energy, generally becomes an economy unto itself.
5. The entire biosphere becomes a free variable (us included). We are no longer functionally necessary for the superintelligence to exist and so it can accomplish it's goals independent of what happens to us.
6. The welfare of the biosphere is taken to an extreme value - in any possible direction, and we can't know which one ahead of time. Eg, it might wipe out all life on earth, not out of malice, but out of disregard. It just wants to put a data center where you are living. Or it might make Earth a paradise for the same reason we like to spoil our pets. Who knows.
Personally I have a suspicion satisfiers are more general than optimizers because this property of taking free variables to extremes works great for solving specific goals one time but is counterproductive over the long term and in the face of shifting goals and a shifting environment, but I'm a layman.