> Because I view myself ABSOLUTELY not as some kind of AI luddite, but I honestly belief that this is one of the very few credible extinction threats that we face, and I'm counting NEITHER climate change nor nuclear war in that category, for reference.
This is absurd histrionics, Daily Mail CAPSLOCK and all. We’ve got signs of an unprecedented heat wave coming with ocean temperatures two standard deviations above normal and you think the problem is a hypothetical artificial intelligence when we can’t even program the damn things to drive better than. 14 year olds?
I think the AI-is-going-to-kill-everyone hysteria is absolutely overblown, both by those who believe it, and the media covering them, but one thing that's always bothered me about the counterpoint is that it a common argument is "AI is bad at what we want it to do so how can it be dangerous?"
This imagines that the only way for AI to do serious harm to us (not even in a "kill everyone" sense) is for it to be some super-competent Skynet-level time traveling demigod. I think it's much more likely that if there is some sort of AI calamity resulting in a lot of deaths, it's because the AI just doesn't work very well and ends up breaking all the HVAC systems in a country during a heat wave or something, rather than a singularity-type event where it "decides" to actively start hunting humans.
I'm not saying climate change is not a giant problem, I'm saying it's unlikely to eradicate our species.
I believe it is dangerously shortsighted to base AI threat estimation on current self-driving performance; the two fields of advancing AI cognitive abilities and improving selfdriving are not sufficiently connected for that IMO.
We're also putting a lot of focus on system designs that are useful to us, instead of directly building potentially threatening architectures (online learning/longterm memory/direct connection + feedback from physical reality), but those could already be within our grasp technologically (maybe?).
No serious climate projections that I'm aware of even reduce Earth's carrying capacity under 10 billion over the next couple of centuries. While very serious (to the tune of trillions of dollars and tens of millions of excess deaths), it is not an extinction level threat, unlike something that is to us what we are to chimpanzees (humans have made many animals extinct on accident). Does such a thing exist right now? No. Could it exist this century? Maybe.
This is absurd histrionics, Daily Mail CAPSLOCK and all. We’ve got signs of an unprecedented heat wave coming with ocean temperatures two standard deviations above normal and you think the problem is a hypothetical artificial intelligence when we can’t even program the damn things to drive better than. 14 year olds?
Way to have your priorities grounded in reality.