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We've already ceded all authority to an algorithm that no one can turn off. Our political and economic structures are running on their own, and no single human or even group of humans can really stop them if they go off the rails. If it's in humanity's best interest for companies not to dump waste anywhere they want, but individual companies benefit from cheap waste disposal, and they lobby regulators to allow it, that sort of lose-lose situation can go on for a very long time. It might be better if everyone could coordinate so that all companies had to play by the same rules, and we all got a cleaner environment. But it's very hard to break out.

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.