This piece, like many anti-doom pieces - is grounded in what Ai does today. Doom scenarios are, however, all extrapolations of multiple exponential curves.
It’s hard to think up the exponential. It’s even harder to communicate an inference one is making across multiple exponentials.
We last had this is early 2020, where Doomers were stockpiling food and medicine and the anti-doomers were ridiculing them. Anti-doomers were focusing on the single exponential, whereas doomers were modelling virus evolution, monitoring and sequencing lag and social dynamics against the exponential. The latter was very hard to communicate before the fact as it was a combination of deep intuition and grappling with the exponential.
I am not saying covid is proof that ai doomers are right, I am saying it’s an example of the known property of human cognition - which is that it struggles with exponentials. Covid was 2 exponentials, AI I can rhink of at least 4 relevant ones.
To me - the fact that 3-4 generations from now AI will have superhuman hacking ability and superhuman persuasive ability (for intuition transfer - think of superhuman persuasive ability as superhuman ability to hack human systems) materialises bio risks swiftly. We already have technology to make robotic systems (mini drone swarms) that can kill humans en-masse with no credible defensive vector bar an EMP. Climbing up those exponentials for further 6 years makes me want to stockpile food and medicine.
It’s hard to think up the exponential. It’s even harder to communicate an inference one is making across multiple exponentials.
We last had this is early 2020, where Doomers were stockpiling food and medicine and the anti-doomers were ridiculing them. Anti-doomers were focusing on the single exponential, whereas doomers were modelling virus evolution, monitoring and sequencing lag and social dynamics against the exponential. The latter was very hard to communicate before the fact as it was a combination of deep intuition and grappling with the exponential.
I am not saying covid is proof that ai doomers are right, I am saying it’s an example of the known property of human cognition - which is that it struggles with exponentials. Covid was 2 exponentials, AI I can rhink of at least 4 relevant ones.
To me - the fact that 3-4 generations from now AI will have superhuman hacking ability and superhuman persuasive ability (for intuition transfer - think of superhuman persuasive ability as superhuman ability to hack human systems) materialises bio risks swiftly. We already have technology to make robotic systems (mini drone swarms) that can kill humans en-masse with no credible defensive vector bar an EMP. Climbing up those exponentials for further 6 years makes me want to stockpile food and medicine.