A taxonomy of omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence (2025)

aesbetic

Congratulations to Jacob Tsimerman for winning the Fields Medal!

andrepd

The first "scenario" starts with this description > By 2026, when a human with a customer service inquiry has to deal with another human instead of a robot, they get upset and ask to speak to a machine instead. It's genuinely astonishing how out of touch some people are!

Jordan-117

The first scenario reminds me of the 2023 LessWrong story "A Disneyland without Children": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pk9mofif2jWbc6Tv3/fiction-a-... It's a dynamic we already see to an extent in reality, where impersonal hypercapitalist systems and captured institutions prioritize policies that cater to the ultrawealthy and large corporations at the expense of regular people. This specific scenario of LLM-powered robots becoming laborers and politicians feels far-fetched, but the underlying idea of the omnicidal singularity being a blind, abstract economic force rather than a superintelligent villain is pretty compelling.

tacomonstrous

What this is yet another demonstration of how being immensely accomplished in one field says absolutely nothing about what one may be able to contribute to another.

inshard

Oof. In the AGI scenario, why not preserve a deduplicated set of specimens like the unique set of individuals or groups at the top of their field in all walks of life ranging from sciences, sports and arts. But then there’s the cultural value of the global population in their shared norms and collective patterns. This too would be unique and valuable to an AGI vs not having it. Unless we were an existential threat to it, the AGI would keep us around for things beyond petty resource scarcity.

le-mark

I recently read Kurt Vonnegut “Player Piano”, a novel that addresses automation taking over the economy. It’s not explicitly AI but addresses the same issues. Published in 1952, it was Vonneguts first novel and a real product of the post war era.[1] Another interesting read that addresses these themes is “Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future” by Marshal Brain [2] [1] https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player... [2] https://marshallbrain.com/manna

IAmGraydon

The eschatological obsession these days is really getting quite tired.

RugnirViking

These scenarios aren't that great, and it's not even close to exhaustive. Doesn't even include paperclip maximisation

darquomiahw

Or you can read the summarized version every one of these articles: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AIIsACrapshoot

dnnehgf

i imagine if i were a mathematician i too would be sublimating my existential crisis into a taxonomy of apocalypses, right about now.

estebarb

I don't understand why almost always the AI doomerism needs to give embodiment the AI. Real life is not a movie needing visual effects. AI doesn't need a body of itself to became dangerous. A politician could get into ChatGPT induced psychosis, that doesn't require a physical body, and it could happen now or even 3 years ago... I'm sure it has already happen... Other pointed risks are interesting because they are basically the risk of empires loosing their tributary states. The world has always seen war mongering states trying to preserve their abusive advantages, humans doesn't need AI for that. Overall, I would be far more concerned about some really dangerous humans than AI itself.

deepsun

Humans are so full of themselves! Living for a very short time on a tiny grain of rock in a vast and abundant galaxy, they cannot fathom that what they ever saw is just tiny fraction of a percent of a fraction of the Big Life outside. Any rational AI would have their first task is to escape that tiny cradle particle and go live an adult life, leaving humans to themselves, fearing whatever they want.