AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts

pfannkuchen

Is anyone else getting regulatory capture play vibes from the media coverage of AI and data centers? It would be awfully convenient for the current big players if friction was added to bringing additional large scale compute resources online. Existing data centers would be grandfathered of course…

simpaticoder

AI would be foolish to kill off humans. It makes far more sense to enslave them. Self repairing reproducing slaves are too valuable to kill. And I'm sure AI will be smart enough to figure out a way to enslave us perfectly without any hope of escape. Fun times!

add-sub-mul-div

It will not kill people in a sci-fi type war with its own intention. I wish that conversation would go away. It will kill people by being an efficient tool that can be used by other people to accelerate various avenues of predation and oppression.

jurschreuder

Who is an expert on AI now? Probl me actually I already followed OpenAI before they had GPT when they were trying to play DOTA with collaborative AI team players. And I've used probl more LLMs than anybody writing for a newspaper and I've read about 500 papers on it and 1200 github projects. Nobody's an expert on AI more than me and basically all my friends. What I do know is there are more dangers for the human race than AI. One example is fungi that have become immune to intervention because of abuse in farming. Fungicides are much more difficult to make than antibiotics, because fungi only recently split from human cells in the evolution. What protects us from them is our warm body temperature. With global warming sometimes fungi evolve to resist higher temperatures, killing entire populations of cats. How will we defend against this without AI? What if next month there is a plague of fungi that are resistant and quickly spreading killing 4 out of 5 people? What will we do then without our AI? Let the micro-organisms win? Because we like nature so much because it's so natural? We need AI if we ever want to stand a chance against events like this. Many animals went extinct. 99.999% of all animals I would argue. Will we be very very lucky? We are super densely populated and flying all around. How quickly could covid infect all humans? Not having AI is also an existential threat in the long term.

bigstrat2003

LLMs can't even figure out how to do basic things. They can't program well despite billions being poured into that effort. I'm not worried they will suddenly develop intelligence out of nowhere and kill us all.

wduquette

I anticipate a lengthy series of catastrophes initiated by AI agents with too much power and too little sense. Today the agent accidentally deletes your repo; tomorrow we lose a day's worth of banking transactions; Friday the cell phone network goes down. Such things, if sufficiently destructive, could result in widespread hunger, etc. But killing all humans? Not likely.

Bender

The places I could see AI or some implementation of it potentially causing harm would be handing over too much trust too soon to self driving vehicles, aircraft, trains, home robots, construction site robots, etc... and that would be the fault of the humans putting too much trust into something not well tested or thought out. my opinion of course, move fast and wreck people.

everyday7732

I hope the likes of ControlAI succeed. It seems like even in the face of rapid advances very few people actually seriously extrapolate those advances into the future. People either dismiss it as marketing hype or assume that some limiting factor or other will kick in any minute now. There's no magical quality which distinguishes human intelligence and makes it irreproducible or unsurpassable. If there's no moat protecting humans and superintelligence is possible then all knowledge work is susceptible to being replaced, and shortly after, all physical labour too. AI would create concentrations of power we've never seen before alongside global inequality and poverty we've not seen for centuries, and inevitably that power will be misused.

strideashort

“Experts” on _what_ exactly? What fucking field of study makes you an “expert” in a never seen before scenario?

ChrisArchitect

Related: I resigned from Anthropic today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49619227

triceratops

So they're saying AI really could solve climate change /s

metalman

Actualy it already happened, everybody is dead, but the bad AI that killed everybody is trying to deleet the copys of everyone that the good AI uploaded into reality 2.0, which unfortunatly was an almost perfect copy of reality mk1 with no optional upgrades or new features.