Not at all. We say "That's just sci-fi" when a story is written about some kind of effect that is extraordinary and without a basis in known science or technology.

A pandemic is perfectly plausible.

There’s nothing wrong with bold predictions, but they should be paired with good methods. The doom predictions are not paired with good explanation.

Black Mirror is helping us prevent all sorts of dystopian outcomes. Every time they depict another way technology could result in bad things happening, we can rule it out as fiction!

Yeah except pandemics are not novel, unlike AI doom scenarios.

There was plenty of pandemic fiction already; people were watching it heaps during 2020. The COVID-19 news did get blown off, but it was mainly that:

1. Normal people assumed the CDC et all would contain the outbreak early, or that it would burn out, like what happened with SARS

2. World leaders brushed it off for a variety of subreasons[0] interesting to political scientists but, for the purposes of this discussion, all boil down to "but I don't WAAANA contain a pandemic."

The underlying problem is that in order for humanity to actually deal with a catastrophic risk, the risk needs to be both plausible enough to the average person as well as have a solution whose costs are not too high. For COVID, by the time the risk was clearly known, the cost to contain it was "refrain from human socialization and remain at home for an indeterminate amount of time plugged into the Metaverse™".

Now, let's look at AI extinction risks:

1. People are aware of them (I've watched Terminator!) and the risks are plausible. However, the connection to currently existing AI is not. As far as the general public is aware, AI is that thing that tells them to eat rocks when they Google old The Onion stories and floods their social media timelines with realistic-looking pictures of Shrimp Jesus.

2. The purported solutions to extinction risks require extreme concentrations of power: you need national control of AI research, bans on large GPU deployments, bans on training on publicly-available copyrighted data, some kind of military effort to render Chinese AI labs inert or dead, etc. Some of these may be attractive to some people[1] but the whole package taken together seems like an obvious power grab, if not outright invocation of other non-AI extinction risks. Like, at some point, if the AI wants to kill us, it just has to nuke its own data centers (or the data centers hosting a competing model) and hope the old Cold War nuclear retaliation systems take the bait.

If someone said, "Hey, your guinea pig or pet rat is going to eat you tomorrow unless you engineer a pathogen that eradicates all rodents from this planet and inject it inside yourself", you probably would tell them to pound sand, even if it is at least theoretically plausible that such a thing would come to pass.

[0] Xi Jinping censored initial discussion of the pandemic as fake news. Donald Trump thought it was going to only affect China. California and the UK Tories were partying in violation of their own lockdown rules. Japan took the excuse to shut down tourism for three years and massively restrict immigration but was, from what I'm told, constitutionally prohibited from implementing any domestic lockdown rules.

[1] I personally would like to see a moratorium on new data centers and an explicit revocation of the EU Text and Data Mining copyright exception

Meh. Lots of people are already smarter than me. I'm maybe slightly above average at best. Those geniuses aren't aligned with my interests either but so far they haven't caused me any serious problems.

The article is gone because the author retracted it

I don't see how that discredits any of their intellectual arguments?

This seems like an ad hominem? "He has weird kinks, therefore his theories are incorrect." Should we investigate the sex lives of every Nobel Prize winner to figure out which prizes need to be rescinded?

Lol this was crazy I hadn't heard this before

So what. Various attackers managed to take down large chunks of the Internet on a frequent basis before LLMs even existed. This killed very few people. The great thing about the Internet is how resilient it is.

It is that they are chatbots. If it were real AI, an actual singularity, I would worry, maybe. But it isn’t. They are absurdly powerful automation tools that can handle logic better than a human can dream of. They take care of the grunt minutiae without complaint. But they are not going to end the world in their current form.

> Let's say they simply manage to take down the internet.

geez, don’t threaten me with a good time.

I think a month without internet would be a fucking amazing lesson for what it means to make things durable and reliable.