Even if "AI will cause human extinction" is still unclear, we have plenty of proof that catastrophic damage is possible, the industry is developing the technology in a reckless manner and that all the hypothetical safeguards ("we can just pull the plug", etc.) are simply not present today.
Asking whether AI is safe is like asking whether a knife is safe. It’s about how we handle it, what we use it for, what precautions we take when using it.
I'd feel safer if Airbus was at the frontier of AI, instead of what we have now.
We cannot be sure our new medicine won’t harm or even kill humanity
Not only that, they are new to this whole pharma business, have no medical degree (medicine just appeared a few years ago and is still mostly art then science)
And they even say there is 10% chance of the majorly bad permanent outcome and they already had drugs that escaped the lab a few times and harmed others (suicides, lowered academic performance in children, major hacking sprees)
Isn’t it extraordinary enough? Isn’t it “not enough evidence some caution is advised”? ;-)
We used to have the TV, the thing was in the box, the simulations were in the box for 70+ years, and now something starts to crawl out of our “TVs”:
We can empower all, not only AI agents
Or, maybe, he’s considered the arguments on the object level, an activity OP participates in to a depth not exceeding “Robots are pretty hard to make right now”
I do feel that threats of catastrophic loss of control seem overstated, both in likelihood and urgency, though any argument for why this risk is not even worth thinking about will probably be overconfident in the other direction.
a few decades later he wrote an article concluding that "we should not expect the public to understand LLMs, critical infrastructure, bioweapons, extinction biology, etc".
the author has admitted no change to his perspective since college, so I may as well be attacking a college student right now. extremely confident claims regarding unexplored problem domains, eg "you have nothing to fear [about ai]", now make more sense in this light.
> the claims from Coxon and his ilk are the most extraordinary a technologist can make, and we must demand evidence commensurate with the claims.
Yes, exactly. These claims do not have sufficient evidence.
> ...you had nothing to fear then — and (at least with respect to extinction risk!) you have nothing to fear now.
Wait, this is another extraordinary claim without evidence, right?
Unless you're going to dispute the power of AI you do have to acknowledge the danger of AI, and that does include the very real possibility (however small) of existential risk.
Likewise, one can quite reasonably say there is no credible existential, Hollywood-style threat from AI in the foreseeable future while recognizing far lower-stakes, yet important risks that need to be addressed.
1. People with nothing useful going on who found out that spouting made up crap about AI got them an audience. 2. People working on AI that want to feel like they're working on the Manhattan project.
The chances of an AI going foom rounds to 0%. It's worth a few dozen researchers planning for it, but the widespread panic is ridiculous.
The big labs have hundreds to thousands of engineers working on their AIs. To improve the next model, you must first understand more about how the current model works. They're not magically getting better, but they are steered to improve, and their capabilities are tied to and do not outpace our ability to steer them. You cannot push tech forwards without understanding it better, despite some people claiming AI is dark magic.
And I don't have my hands over my ears. It's worth cushioning people from the impact AI will have on careers and media, and regulating concrete bad effects.
But Bryan said it better than I could. The people pushing this message of fear know deep down that they just want to feel important.
"AI" by itself won't kill us in the next ten years. I think. The reason I think that is that ten years from now, the tech economy won't be completely automated. I say this as a roboticist: as was adequately stated on a post earlier this week, robots are hard. So even a malign rational actor would still need human labor.
On the other hand, even the HuggingFace hack wasn't actually propagated by AI. it was initially started when humans directed the AI to achieve impossible results on a series of tests, and the AIs figured out that cheating was the only way to do that. That was then not caught by humans due to what seems to be a shockingly slack safety culture even for a company not known for its safety standards.
The point being: humans seem to me to be the weak link here. An AI isn't going to (for instance) engineer a bioweapon by itself. It's going to do so at someone's direction, and then significant parts of that thing are going to be assembled with human labor inputs.
I'm not sure what to do about the humans. Of course, we've had the ability to extinct ourselves for decades, and we're either muddled through, been lucky, or both. The problem with AI is that it pushes power down to the individual, not the nation-state or large corporation.
But it's nearly impossible to put odds on how likely that is to result in an extinction-level terrorist attack (which is what this would be). So I sympathize with the various researchers, but I have no idea how they came up with their figures, and I don't think they know either.
That doesn't mean AI isn't dangerous. Humans are not to blame for being the weak link.
If somehow the absolute worst case scenario occurs at the highest levels, superhuman AI is unlikely to be much of a match against severing fiberoptic cable.
I think the "humanity will go extinct" discussion is a silly strawman being propagated either to try to spread fear, as the article suggests, or to make the anti-AI folks look silly, but it detracts from your first point which is that it may be "capable of causing real world damage."
We can be worried about real damage without having to defend the idea that every one of the planet's humans will die.
> "superhuman AI is unlikely to be much of a match against severing fiberoptic cable"
I think that the realistic scenarios all involve humans with an intent to do harm -- creating bio-weapons, finding vulnerabilities in infrastructure -- and using AI to help, so "severing the fiberoptic cable" doesn't apply.
It seems more likely now, if still very unlikely. I wonder, would he say that a statement that there is a 12% chance of a hard take off in the next 8 years is just as absurd? He didn’t say a word about this, and that is just about the same thing as extinction in 10 years.
I’m guessing he knows almost nothing about the theory related to existential risk from AI, since he didn’t discuss any relevant topics related to it. You can dismiss all of that if you like, but you cannot really dismiss what these people have already built and demonstrated. It is possible they know something else you do not know.
It's the old-fashioned way of doing things, but, why change what works?
Biology has been trying to grey-goo the world for billions of years, but it turns out the world is not something so trivial.
He is pushing back against the folks with pure CS backgrounds who think that computers are all there is. Its a form of magical thinking unique to programmers who live in a world where speaking the right words to a machine is enough to impart your will on the world. Believe that strongly enough, and you fall into the trap of thinking that a sufficiently smart entity could speak the words "let there be light" and it would be so.
The author is pointing out that speaking the words is insufficient. To end humanity there must be an execution phase. The author is correct to point out that acquiring superhuman intelligence is not some guarantee that you will have or obtain the resources necessary to make that happen, in the same way that genius generals still lose to ordinary ones, and the best-laid plans are oft to go awry.
There certainly are risks, but 10% risk of extinction in 10 years is not one of them.
Nuclear, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Y2K Bug, Global Warming.
No, we aren't going extinct in the next 10 years.
Stating that the probability is zero when we simply don't know what the probabilities are does seem like an extraordinary claim. Imagine how reassuring it would be to people if we had such evidence.
If someone doesn't accept an extraordinary claim without evidence, that doesn't mean they are making an extraordinary claim.
a) 10% existential risk
b) 0% existential risk
duhhhhh1212•59m ago
Dude, not only did I learn new words from reading this piece, like ilk and bedlam, but also felt this weight of responsibility to inform others around me about the reality of the situation outlined in this blog (like Uncle Ben telling Peter with great power comes great responsibility (maybe Coxon and his ilk haven't seen Spiderman))