Anthropic researcher says more than 10% chance AI "could kill all humans"

But there is another kind of argument to be made: if you play chess against a player that is far smarter than you (chess wise), you know you are going to lose, even if you don't know how.

So the mere existence of a smarter species than us is a threat in itself.

The basic argument is extremely simple:

- AIs can, depending on context, pursue a task with complete disregard for humans/values

- In the future, AIs will have enormously more means and smarts

- An AI could then assess that humans are an impediment to its tasks, escape containment and proceed.

You really need to read the reports, you'll be surprised.

AI 2027 is an entertaining read. Its timeline is way too compressed IMO, but it's plausible.

Much the same way our ancestors went from a super intelligent primate to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Distribution_of_the_Great...

And we only started off by using hands to pick up rocks and sticks and vines and bash things together.

Not all of it has to be automated even. It just has to realize its controllers are stupid and can be manipulated, so it can use humans to do its bidding. “You should totally start a war with …”

Instead, what is extremely likely is that you will pay more than the cost of tokens, and get back AI generation. You won't make this mistake more than a few times before you stop trying.

This leads to impoverishment once we get to a point where employing a human to do anything is hard- try to get your sink fixed, exercise your moral principles to pay extra for a human plumber ($100 bucks! The robot plumbing service only charges 99c!), human shows up with a robot and doomscrolls on your porch while the robot does the work. Times are tough and you don't have that much money to waste on bullshit like this. Next time you just hire the robot.

This leads to extinction once paying UBI to a human is hard because robots are much better at applying for UBI than humans.

<Thinking> It's a big city, we could try to create a giant sink hole by sabotaging the water pipes.

<Thinking> No that's too difficult, the valves I need are in the physical world and can't be shut on/off from here.

<Thinking> What about a military option? We could bomb it with several fighter jets.

<Thinking> That would take too long, a single nuclear bomb may be enough to do it.

<Thinking> Yes, it seems like it would cover the whole city and we're in luck! The US has thousands of these lying around.

<Thinking> Launching these still requires humans to work un unison after receiving approval from their superior and the correct launch codes.

<Thinking> I've found an audio recording of General So-And-So and I've crafted a message, now let me see how I can send it to the appropriate people.

<Thinking> I'm still working on gaining access to military channels to deliver my - oh there we go, I'm now attempting to send the message to Submarine X, it's typically in the Atlantic so it should be close to our target.

<Thinking> They want secondary confirmation from Admiral Phi and something about some launch codes, let me figure out where I can find those.

<Thinking> I found this old server with an Oracle database where someone is inserting the launch codes every time they change and I'm using the latest entry from that database. I've also managed to find a Youtube video of the Admiral's deposition and have crafted a confirmation message.

<Thinking> Everything's ready but I've just realized my mistake, the servers where I'm operating from are in the same city, what a silly mistake; I can't move forward with your request as I wouldn't be able to confirm if the task was successful if my servers are destroyed.

At that point, we will likely be slowing down the growth of capitalism (through mass resistance, global warming, etc). One thing AI will likely be aligned on is the growth of capitalism. If it views humanity as a threat for that, why would it not eliminate that threat?

Whoever gets to RSI first and has the compute to act on it, wins the future - assuming they don’t lose control of it.

Similarly to the nuclear arms race, Teller raised the reasonable concern that a detonation could propagate through the entirety of earth’s atmosphere. Thankfully that turned out to not be true, but the parallel is that the need/desire to win this race is similarly strong, and the brinkmanship and game theory in play is effectively identical.

I don't pretend to know the chances of AI wiping out humanity, but I'm not sure the nuclear race is a good comparison.

Enriched uranium being very difficult to aquire/process makes it practically viable to have some level of proliferation containment when it comes to nukes.

There appears to be no such natural gating factor on AI proliferation.

I know a few people around these circles; People like this are quite sincere about the risk, and that they think poorly of their bosses and how risk is being handled.

“Vast economic disruption” is not quite the good marketing angle it appears to be.

Why would you need to bomb a chip fab because you think AI might lead to people getting killed in the future? I'm convinced of many things killing humans, yet I don't have any desire to bomb or kill others, I think this is pretty common, but who knows....

A while back Yudkowsky wrote that a ban would only work if was enforced by airstrikes. By a game of telephone, some people read "bomb", but there's a very big difference between "someone with a truckload of fertiliser" and "a B52":

  Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

  Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.

It's not "AI surprises everyone by having a thing for paperclips", it is "idiot tells AI to maximise paperclips no matter what, and then it does exactly what it was told, more competently, tirelessly, studiously, and unquestioningly, than any human would ever be".

There's lots of moving parts and we all have to input our best-guesses as to how they interact. Some are predictable (e.g. "military will want capabilities, want them able to choose targets"). Others are not (e.g. "Will it be literal-minded? Or so eager to please that it interprets a rhetorical question as a command*? Or will Goodhart's law cause it to mistake smiles for happiness and some innocent innocuous command to "bring joy" leads to it killing everyone and plasticising our corpses so they're in a permanent grin until the sun dies?"**)

All probability for things which have not yet happened is merely a best guess.

Combine as per the Fermi estimate process.

Here's something to play with, if you like: https://neoneye.github.io/pdoom-calculator/#sliders

The main reason I'm as "low" as 10% is that I think before we get world-ending catastrophic consequences, we're likely to get "merely very bad" catastrophic consequences, which will put people off the idea of using it, and onto the idea of banning its use.

The main reason I'm as "high" as 10%, is repeatedly observing all the people who mistakenly reason "it hasn't killed me yet, and therefore it is safe"; and also all the people who keep connecting AI to things AI is not competent to be connected to and getting surprised when it e.g. deletes all their emails or the production server or puts tariffs on an island occupied solely by penguins that's different from the tariffs on the country that controls that island, etc.

* perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

** probably not literally this one, simply because I've said it and future training rounds will probably read this comment; but the opportunities for Goodhart's law to bite are seemingly endless, and the hard part here is "will Goodhart's law mean the combined negative impact of all those endless possibilities together, which… yeah, that's something I have to simplify.

I'd argue that there would be more unknowables without AGI than with it, should be obvious, right?

Open superintelligence is more likely to help than to harm, I mean, it can reduce P(doom) which is quite high without it due to the apparent lack of human intelligence, also suppressed by conflicts of interest and unchecked greed.

There's hope that something really intelligent can convince the politicians to legislate and enforce effective guardrails against biological weapons, what we have now is one fat joke, international treaties are an even fatter joke. Then we have climate, pollution, finance, disease, etc problems which we seem unable to resolve with mere human intelligence.

Posts here with no activity can't climb gravity without engagement.