There Is No Turning Back on AI | The Free Press

So when people predict a high degree of existential risk from AGI (artificial general intelligence, which is when the AI gets so good, it s indistinguishable from human intelligence), I don t actually think arguing back on their chosen terms is the correct response. Radical agnosticism is the correct response, where all specific scenarios are pretty unlikely. Nonetheless, I am still for people doing constructive work on the problem of alignment, just as we do with all other technologies, to improve them. I have even funded some of this work through Emergent Ventures.

I am a bit distressed each time I read an account of a person arguing himself or arguing herself into existential risk from AI being a major concern. No one can foresee those futures! Once you keep up the arguing, you also are talking yourself into an illusion of predictability. Since it is easier to destroy than create, once you start considering the future in a tabula rasa way, the longer you talk about it, the more pessimistic you will become. It will be harder and harder to see how everything hangs together, whereas the argument that destruction is imminent is easy by comparison. The case for destruction is so much more readily articulable boom! Yet at some point your inner Hayekian (Popperian?) has to take over and pull you away from those concerns. (Especially when you hear a nine-part argument based upon eight new conceptual categories that were first discussed on LessWrong eleven years ago.) Existential risk from AI is indeed a distant possibility, just like every other future you might be trying to imagine. All the possibilities are distant

via www.thefp.com

I tend to agree with Tyler. I think the main risks from AI and AGI are political, namely reducing us all to CBDC-governed slavery, and our getting what little we know from AI’s aligned to elitist views of The Good. But that doesn’t have to happen, and there’s little most of us can do about it anyway. The potential for the good is great and obvious. I’m about to ask chatGPT what sort of glue I should use to try to put my car seats back together, for example.