Geoff Hinton, Stuart Russell, Jürgen Schmidhuber and Demis Hassabis all talk about something singularity-like as fairly near term, and all have concerns with ruin, though not all think it is the most likely outcome.
That's the backprop guy, top AI textbook guy, co-inventor of LSTMs (only thing that worked well for sequences before transformers)/highwaynets-resnets/arguably GANs, and the founder of DeepMind.
Schmidhuber (for context, he was talking near term, next few decades):
> All attempts at making sure there will be only provably friendly AIs seem doomed. Once somebody posts the recipe for practically feasible self-improving Goedel machines or AIs in form of code into which one can plug arbitrary utility functions, many users will equip such AIs with many different goals, often at least partially conflicting with those of humans. The laws of physics and the availability of physical resources will eventually determine which utility functions will help their AIs more than others to multiply and become dominant in competition with AIs driven by different utility functions. Which values are "good"? The survivors will define this in hindsight, since only survivors promote their values.
Hassasbis:
> We are approaching an absolutely critical moment in human history. That might sound a bit grand, but I really don't think that is overstating where we are. I think it could be an incredible moment, but it's also a risky moment in human history. My advice would be I think we should not "move fast and break things." [...] Depending on how powerful the technology is, you know it may not be possible to fix that afterwards.
Hinton:
> Well, here’s a subgoal that almost always helps in biology: get more energy. So the first thing that could happen is these robots are going to say, ‘Let’s get more power. Let’s reroute all the electricity to my chips.’ Another great subgoal would be to make more copies of yourself. Does that sound good?
Russell:
“Intelligence really means the power to shape the world in your interests, and if you create systems that are more intelligent than humans either individually or collectively then you’re creating entities that are more powerful than us,” said Russell at the lecture organized by the CITRIS Research Exchange and Berkeley AI Research Lab. “How do we retain power over entities more powerful than us, forever?”
“If we pursue [our current approach], then we will eventually lose control over the machines. But, we can take a different route that actually leads to AI systems that are beneficial to humans,” said Russell. “We could, in fact, have a better civilization.”
Should we be concerned about networked, hypersensing AI with bad code? Yes.
Is that an existential threat? Not so long as we remember that there are off switches.
Should we be concerned about kafkaesqe hellscapes of spam and bad UX? Yes.
Is that an existential threat? Sort of, if we ceded all authority to an algorithm without a human in the loop with the power to turn it off.
There is a theme here.
Remember there are off switches for human existence too, like whatever biological virus a super intelligence could engineer.
An off-switch for a self-improving AI isn't as trivial as you make it sound if it gets to anything like in those quotes, and even then you are assuming the human running it isn't malicious. We assume some level of sanity at least with the people in charge of nuclear weapons, but it isn't clear that AI will have the same large state actor barrier to entry or the same perception of mutually assured destruction if the actor were to use it against a rival.
But the other side is downplaying their accomplishments. For example Yann LeCun is saying "the things I invented aren't going to be as powerful as some people are making out".
He also says Facebook solved all the problems with their recommendation algorithms' unintended effects on society after 2016.
No? Then what makes you think you'll be able to turn off the $evilPerson AI?
> You can also ask that question about the other side
What other side? Who in the "other side" is making a self-serving claim?
You tell me. An EMP wouldn't take out data centers? No implementation has an off switch? AutoGPT doesn't have a lead daemon that can be killed? Someone should have this answer. But be careful not to confuse yours truly, a random internet commentator speaking on the reality of AI vs. the propaganda of the neo-cryptobros, versus people paying upwards of millions of dollars daily to run an expensive, bloated LLM.
The people who profit from a killer AI will fight to defend it.
Eminent domain lays out a similar pattern that can be followed. Existence of risk is not a deterrent to creation, simply an acknowledgement for guiding requirements.
Well that's hardly reassuring. Do you not understand what I'm saying or do you not care?
Though there is an element of your comments being too brief, hence the mostly. Say, 2% vs 38%.
That constitutes 40% of the available categorization of introspection regarding my current discussion state. The remaining 60% is simply confidence that your point represents a dominated strategy.
If we have a superhuman AI, we can run down the powerplants for a few days.
Would it suck? Sure, people would die. Is it simple? Absolutely -- Texas and others are mostly already there some winters.
Do I think capitalism has the potential to be as bad as a runaway AI? No. I think that it's useful for illustrating how we could end up in a situation where AI takes over because every single person has incentives to keep it on, even when the outcome of all people keeping it running turns out to be really bad. A multi-polar trap, or "Moloch" problem. It seems likely to end up with individual actors all having incentives to deploy stronger and smarter AI, faster and faster, and not to turn them off even as they start to either do bad things to other people or just the sheer amount of resources dedicated to AI starts to take its toll on earth.
That's assuming we've solved alignment, but that neither we or AGI has solved the coordination problem. If we haven't solved alignment, and AGIs aren't even guaranteed to act in the interest of the human that tries to control them, then we're in worse shape.
Altman used the term "cambrian explosion" referring to startups, but I think it also applies to the new form of life we're inventing. It's not self-replicating yet, but we are surely on-track on making something that will be smart enough to replicate itself.
As a thought experiment, you could imagine a primitive AGI, if given completely free reign, might be able to get to the point where it could bootstrap self-sufficiency -- first hire some humans to build it robots, buy some solar panels, build some factories that can plug into our economy to build factories and more solar panels and GPUs, and get to a point where it is able to survive and grow and reproduce without human help. It would be hard, it would need either a lot of time, or a lot of AI minds working together.
But that's like a human trying to make a sandwich by farming or raising every single ingredient, wheat, pigs, tomatoes, etc, though. A much more effective way is to just make some money and trade for what you need. That depends on AIs being able to own things, or just a human turning over their bank account to an AI, which has already happened and probably will keep happening.
My mind goes to a scenario where AGI starts out doing things for humans, and gradually transitions to just doing things, and at some point we realize "oops", but there was never a point along the way where it was clear that we really had to stop. Which is why I'm so adamant that we should stop now. If we decide that we've figured out the issues and can start again later, we can do that.
Like try turning off the internet. That's the same situation we might be in with regards to AI soon. It's a revolutionary tech now with multiple Google-grade open source variants set to be everywhere.
This doesn't mean it can't be done. Sure, we in principle could "turn off" the internet, and in principal could "uninvent" the atom bomb if we all really coordinated and worked hard. But this failure to imagine that "turning off dangerous AI" in the future will ever be anything other than an easy on/off switch is so far-gone ridiculous to me I don't understand why anyone believes it provides any kind of assurance.
Maybe it needs a full cluster for training if it is self improving (or maybe that is done another way more similar to finetuning the last layers).
If that is still the case with something super-human in all domains then you'd have to shut down all minor residential solar installs, generators, etc.