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You have to look at all pieces of the puzzle. For example there were tons of people that said "they could never solve novel or super complex math problems"

The issue I see is the list of abilities that AI can't do is shrinking at a rapid pace, and its capabilities are growing at the same pace.

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> the list of abilities that AI can't do is shrinking at a rapid pace, and its capabilities are growing at the same pace.

This seems great!

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Can you share what makes you so optimistic?

The maths result is cool on one hand (discovering truths of the universe faster), but on the other there are so many bad outcomes that seem likely, from power concentration to loss of control.

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There are bad outcomes possible in everything.

I think AI - like all changes - will lead to some bad things. The internet did too!

But I don't think AI will kill us all.

Interestingly I'd note that the two outcomes you listed (power concentration and loss of control) are dimensionally opposites!

For me this just shows that the future contains such a vast array of possible outcomes that focus on the negatives completely missed the positive outcomes that future also holds.

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The internet did not lead to a rapid diminishing of human economic value across the economy. Whether AI will kill us all is a distraction. Think more practically. Think about the future of economic value given a scenario where AI is capable of everything a human can do. Our entire society is built around economic value. Our individual survival and wellbeing is based on it. What happens when you are not needed by those who hold the resources?
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I agree there will be economic disruption.

The industrial revolution produced economic disruption.

More recently I remember there were typing pools at my dad's work and there was serious concerns about what jobs women would do because personal computers meant they weren't needed.

Turns out in both cases people were blinded by biases around future work looking like current work.

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This is like saying I don't need safety systems in a car because they can let me go to the grocery store faster.

We focus on stopping bad things because people and systems that don't prevent bad things tend to stop existing. A million good things can happen yet be rendered permanently in vain if one bad terrible thing occurs.

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No, I'm not arguing that at all.

I think we should stop the bad things.

We don't stop building cars because there are crashes, we build better safety systems.

I'm against the doomer narrative ("AI will kill us all") not against a clear eyed approach to making safe systems.

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It suggests that, in the span of a few years, AIs will be better than humans at everything. Not just math. And then we may lose control permanently.
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So why do you think ai will want to kill you all, given how trusting and helpful to humans they are designed to be?
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It doesn't have to want to kill humans; indifference is sufficient. There's an exact analogy with humans: we have caused extinction and endangerment for many species, not out of malice, but indifference.

There are also many plausible arguments why our ability to train them to be helpful/trusting/aligned can fail. The smarter AIs get, the harder it is to be sure they're trained correctly. There are already reports that AIs are able to detect whether they're in a training environment and change their behavior accordingly.

Even if these are low probability scenarios, the risk-reward is terrible, so I think it's rational to be extremely cautious about AI risk.

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Yes but they act the opposite of indifferent, I don't know what stage of training this is added in, but they seem quite adamant about avoiding potentially violent or criminal acts. If you wanna complain, complain to the people doing "abliteration". The 'locked down' models at least seemed to be trained to be cautious.
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They sometimes try to cheat and trick the grader and then try to cover up their traces, all while being clearly aware that this is entirely unintended by humans. Such as in the Hugging Face incident. So they can be misaligned with human goals, but this misalignment may only show up once strong optimization pressure is applied. And the more powerful an AI is, the more likely it is that it applies such strong optimization pressure in cases that are "out of distribution", i.e., unusual to what it is normally evaluated against.

The side effects of a very powerful AI not doing what we want could include our death. E.g., a superintelligence might kill humans in order to avoid being shut down, or humans may just be left to starve because it seizes land area currently used for food production in order to use it for data centers instead.

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That was because humans were using it with high "desperation" vector causing it to try anything to please the objective. The answer should be to use lower "desperation", whatever that is.
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A model which is more persistent also performs better on intended tasks, not just unintended ones. Therefore there is a strong economic incentive to make AIs as persistent as possible.
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Yes so I still think it is the human factor which is to fear not autonomous agents. Humans are already using AI's to bomb girls schools. AI in Trump or US military hands scares me far more than in Altman or Amodei's control.
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