It's uncool to look like an alarmist nut, but sometimes there's no socially acceptable alarm and the risks are real: https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
It's worth looking at the underlying arguments earnestly, you can with an initial skepticism but I was persuaded. Alignment is also been something MIRI and others have been worried about since as early as 2007 (maybe earlier?) so it's also a case of a called shot, not a recent reaction to hype/new LLM capability.
Others have also changed their mind when they looked, for example:
- https://twitter.com/repligate/status/1676507258954416128?s=2...
- Longer form: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-ho...
For a longer podcast introduction to the ideas: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/116...
No. It’s not taken seriously because it’s fundamentally unserious. It’s religion. Sometime in the near future this all powerful being will kill us all by somehow grabbing all power over the physical world by being so clever to trick us until it is too late. This is literally the plot to a B-movie. Not only is there no evidence for this even existing in the near future, there’s no theoretical understanding how one would even do this, nor why someone would even hook it up to all these physical systems. I guess we’re supposed to just take it on faith that this Forbin Project is going to just spontaneously hack its way into every system without anyone noticing.
It’s bullshit. It’s pure bullshit funded and spread by the very people that do not want us to worry about real implications of real systems today. Care not about your racist algorithms! For someday soon, a giant squid robot will turn you into a giant inefficient battery in a VR world, or maybe just kill you and wear your flesh as to lure more humans to their violent deaths!
Anyone that takes this seriously, is the exact same type of rube that fell for apocalyptic cults for millennia.