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.
If the worst case outcome is we have to even temporarily shut down global shipping, banking, transport, health services, communications and national infrastructure to contain a self-propagating misaligned AI that can evolve itself and work its way into any sufficiently large computer system to escape humans preventing it from finishing its task, that seems like something we should be trying very hard to avoid.
That is an argument that at least makes sense.
The super intelligence as homicidal maniac just doesn't make sense. There is less intelligent wildlife all around us and we mostly completely ignore it. We have more interesting things to do with our time as intelligent beings than carry out a bird or rabbit genocide.
It almost seems like the projection of some kind of paranoid delusion about change.
But, why would we not create a fully AI-operated factory/chemical plant/fab as soon as it is economically advantageous? Or a missile silo, as soon as it seems tactically necessary?
Fantasies of AI destruction do hinge upon AI getting access to the physical world. The whole fear is they don't stay on the other side of the fibre optic cable.
I do think there are good reasons to believe that isn't the immediate game over that Yudkowsky seems to think it would be; the physical world is much more resistant to manipulation and optimisation than the digital world.
But I do think it's naive to say that the human socioeconomic system will be able to resist handing physical systems over to AI control. Right now, the world's wealthy and powerful are doing everything they can to make it happen:
> Similarly, it is inevitable that within a generation, robots are going to do most of the menial work in the world of atoms: transforming atoms, moving atoms, and storing atoms are inevitably robot tasks. And while our imagination may be captivated by humanoid robots, the specialized ones are far better suited to most of those jobs. “Industrial AI” as a category is the inevitable application of specialized robots to atoms-heavy industries.
Well, for one thing, because it would be dangerous? Why don't you just give Claude Code access to your entire computer without any safeguards? If you wouldn't even give Claude Code unfettered access to your workstation, which really doesn't have much consequential on it in the grand scheme of things, Why in the Fuck would someone give them direct access to infrastructure?
In that situation, I am not afraid of AI. I am terrified of the people making decisions, though.
But secondly, and this is something that needs to be stressed: We use funny words to describe AI. Maybe even the word "AI" is a little bit funny. But anyway, We actually don't even have the means to create "autonomous" AI, really. When we say "autonomous" in relation to AI, we really just mean that it runs without any direct human intervention, but it pretty much always hard-depends on humans maintaining hardware, because AI can't sprout legs and run on its own.
I find it annoying that we're all cool debunking Ed Zitron for being wrong, but we have an ever increasing body of evidence that AI safety doomers are wrong, and it keeps getting much, much stronger, and we're still sitting here pretending this is a real threat. Meanwhile, we're actually seeing the real threat that AI has for humanity, so why are we listening to these LessWrong doomers that have never been right before again? (And I say that as someone who is generally a fan of Scott Alexander, for whatever that's worth.)
Yes, that is what I was trying to say. Something being obviously dangerous doesn't mean we (edit: they) won't decide to do it anyway.
From a song on an album with a pertinent cover image, "who can stand in the way when there's a dollar to be made?"
I spent the summer in a rural area of a country whose very name you have been conditioned to be disgusted to hear. Low air defense coverage in this sparsely populated area. Mobile internet was down for days for all but extremely limited traffic to a few domestic internet services, because there was a need to prevent enemy drone systems from using mobile internet for command and control. Palantir AI threatened my family’s life and more than “severing fiber optic cable” was required.
So what would exclude military adversaries from consideration? I happen to believe that the country that the west so detests would not engage in such use of AI against civilians (and if you disagree then your reason for fear greatly increases!), but I have personally experienced that there is indeed a path to mass death should entities engaging in terrorism arm themselves with AI.
Definitely not claiming that the 10% claim is accurate or good behavior, but I do think I have a substantial counterpoint to the claim that there’s no path.
Military orders and elections that decide the fates of entire countries are often controlled by electronic systems too.
We have been wiring up the world for AI control since 1980s.
An ASI can just walk in, and see an entire nervous system waiting idle for a brain to slot into it. A carefully adjusted text message here, a spoofed phone call there. For a sufficiently advanced system, it wouldn't even be hard to pilot the entirety of humankind like a fancy meat suit.