There is currently no reason to believe that such a superintelligence is likely or would have any of the powers people claim.
By shutting down open-weight models? Why not just do it now then?
You can do at home gene editing with open source software and have it synthesized into a bacteria for the cost of a nice meal for two (under $100), or viral vector for less than $500. That's in reach of anyone that can snatch a purse.
> That's in reach of anyone that can snatch a purse
I went to primary school with some guys who could/would snatch purses. I *promise* you, they are not able to gene edit organisms with FOSS.
I get your general point, but I think the bar to entry is still much higher than petty crime and larceny.
For now in most parts of the world it's easier to acquire a gun either legally or on the "grey market" and be assured that it will work for the intended purpose than to 3D print a gun, find a shooting range to test out the gun and iterate until it works fine enough.
A plague can easily be made by a lone actor, made in a home lab, and spread via airflight to a dozen locations by the same.
Gene sequences can ever be ordered online.
It's got all the same problems as the concept of a dirty bomb did, only worse (dirty bombs aren't practical because handling highly radioactive materials en masse is both highly visible and will kill anyone trying to do it without the money and facilities).
Which might be true, sometimes, but also might not.
And especially will not, if the distinction drawn is between blanket statement "worried about AI" and "not worried about AI".
We're not going to be smarter than a superintelligent AI. The things we conceive it doing if it were given a malicious task (bioterrorism, killer nano-machines, pure fusion bombs sidesteping the non-proliferation bottleneck of Pu239, etc) are likely not the full set of things it can do to harm us. I don't think it does us any favors to dismiss the risks here.
Even the things we can conceive of are very scary, to me at least.
So to me it seems like the prime candidates to come up with stuff like this are researchers working in defense and similar fields, probably not some deranged lunatic in a basement. And certainly not a rogue AI on its own.
Given the recent HF hack it seems likely that human-level intelligence could identify a fair number of avenues of attack, with some time and effort. To say nothing of anything superhuman.
Unfortunately it seems like we can't assume we can "box" the AI (e.g., deny it connection to the Internet) and expect that to last. The AI safety people used to run scenarios imagining ways the AI might convince humans to let it out of the box. It turns out that many humans will eagerly pull it out without the AI doing anything at all, aside from the human knowing the AI's power. Or the one responsible for setting up the box will somehow fail, or just not bother and then lie about it.
Of course we can do that. It's not an eternal being of light existing on the astral plane, but some code executing on someone's GPU.
It stops existing once you press Ctrl + C
>And especially will not, if the distinction drawn is between blanket statement "worried about AI" and "not worried about AI".
I'm just describing the general pattern I see in cognitive tendencies.
If you can think of a way to make the fundamental point about the limitations of our knowledge in a way that's still compelling but less antagonistic, feel free to suggest how I could've rewritten my comment.
My safeguards blocked this request.
I think we have a tendency to think first of the horrible outcomes possible, and not the more radical or even humane ones.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I value property rights as much as the next guy.
My point is that fundamental misalignment doesn’t necessarily or automatically imply max violence.
Still I think that even a super smart AI can't find a way to destroy the world without physical resources that are not easy to get, unless it can hack many systems (like in the movie Eagle Eye), maybe then yes. So let's use AI now to tighten security :-).
It only takes one.