It amazes me how pieces like this never stop to question whether these beliefs are genuine.

If I'm one of these researchers who's leaving their position, "I am so smart that I can make something world endingly dangerous, but also so principled that I'm willing to walk away from it" is a pretty slick bit of self promotion.

Even if I was making a career change for unrelated reasons, that's absolutely the story I'd be telling.

My bet is that humans will kill humans faster than AI. AI enables not only good actors, but also bad actors: Russians, Iranians, Houthis, other terrorist groups - they all now effectively use AI to speed-up development of their weapons as well as hybrid warfare.

From TFA:

    "AI hardly needs to wipe out humanity in order to be harmful, though. Many experts predict that more powerful models will lead to a coming wave of AI-assisted cyberattacks. The technology is now widely used for disinformation campaigns, and military adoption of AI is accelerating rapidly."

The "zone" of public discourse is flooded with sewage. US news business has lost its mind. And government...

Humans being "in-the-loop" is not enough. Humans must know what they are actually saying and doing. Humans just being "in-the-loop" cannot fix incompetence in social policy and software design.

Humans are "in-the-loop" in corporations and that isn't working very well for society.

TL;DR: Researchers assumed it would be easier to align these models when they become smarter. In reality, agents are getting increasingly smarter but aligning them also becomes increasingly harder, or even impossible. They are losing their control over the agents. They don’t write their code anymore. They don’t know agents limits nor how to limit them.

They are like lab scientists in a Hollywood thriller, watching a mutant organism rapidly evolving in front of their eyes.

Why? That's easy.

They believe the sci-fi, rather than the reality. They've bought their own hype, and abandoned their critical thinking skills.

They're the guy saying to the computer "Say you're alive", and then being astonished when the computer says "I am alive."

From permanent underclass to human extinction. What's next?

Right now there's pretty limited set of actions that rogue AI can do with internet access. The most dangerous options are hacking into biolab facility, and maybe hacking into nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons.

These things should be as secure as possible, and I don't think rogue AIs, even super intelligent ones, have the capability to destroy humanity. Not to mention, super intelligent AIs would know that destroying humanity will also destroy themselves.

Maybe in 20 years once we have only self driving cars, robots in every household or maybe robots with weapons, then AI would pose a real extinction risk. But we're not there yet and it depends less on the development of AI and more on the development of physical real world robots.

I'm surprised at the lack of reference to Asimov[0] in this context.

It may be the case that he was too idealistic, but those Three Laws seem foundational to discussion of what we do with AI.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

AI is a problem only now where the people in power or their families are at risk of being assassinated. AI assisted drones were not a problem at all when they were sent for years to kill everybody in weddings at some obscure Asian country. None of this researchers were complaining then.

-----------------------

Is obvious that Trump fears an AI assisted killer droid attack. Change of hair tone (obviously to make any automatic face match more difficult, and confuse any long-distance shooter), thick plastic screens seen behind him at rallies to stop drones and shooters. A cavalcade of black limousines in the road with a Trump impersonator trying his best effort to be noticed... (Why would you travel in a bullet-proof vehicle with the bullet-proof window opened? the only logical explanation is trying to lure out any hitman hiding in the location).

He looks much less smug; is reducing his Chiquito de la Calzada impersonations [1], and adopting a lower profile, maybe also fearing the post-midterms. His social truth posts are filled with images of him with radioactive fire balls in his hands and traveling in planes and garbage trucks. Asking for a ride out of US, Trump?

The risk of some disruptive event in the next 60 days is greater than ever in US history. It does not need to be assisted by AI. NS (natural stupidity) is more than enough. I'm particularly concerned by the triad: Lincoln bathroom + UCF fight + distracting pool.

I don't see how this could be stopped unless every country agrees to sign treatises and follow international laws of war. Sadly this can't happen until a few old men and war criminals are jailed or die of old age. Nobody respect treatises anymore.

These men will block or delay the climate actions until is too late. Will send their army to kill left and right, will remove anti famine measures just by spite, killing thousands. They will do anything to save themselves from jail, or to earn one million more.

These men, not AI, are the real problem. But they rarely exit their bunkers nowadays. They know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiquito_de_la_Calzada

Is it because they will get funding to stop the risk even if the risk never existed in the first place to any significant extent? Are most of these wild declarations not exclusively for market value and funding?

Narrative collapse.

A common retort to someone talking about extinction risk is "only people which don't work on AI research or understand transformers are scared. people that work on LLMs know better than to fear matrix multiplication".

Pre IPO glazing

The best part of all of this is being so powerless and poor that nothing I can do or say will make one bit of difference in the struggle.

I can just sit back and watch the technofeudal system form and serf the web.

[dead]

[dead]