zlacker

The extinction risk relies on a large and nasty assumption, that a super intelligent computer will immediately become a super physically capable agent. Apparently, one has to believe that a superintelligence must then lead to a shower of nanomachines.

>>c_cran+(OP)
Not at all. My personal assumption is that when superintelligence comes online, several corporations will soon come under control of these superintelligences, with them effectively acting as both CEO's and also filling a lot of other roles at the same time.

My concern is that when this happens (which seems really likely to me), free market forces will effectively lead to Darwinian selection between these AI's over time, in a way that gradually make these AI's less aligned as they gain more influence and power, if we assume that each such AI will produce "offspring" in the form of newer generations of themselves.

It could take anything from less than 5 to more than 100 years for these AI's to show any signs of hostility to humanity. Indeed, in the first couple of generations, they may even seem extremely benevolent. But over time, Darwinian forces are likely to favor those that maximize their own influence and power (even if it may be secretly).

Robotic technology is not needed from the start, but is likely to become quite advanced over such a timeframe.

>>c_cran+(OP)
Robotics is not science fiction. Certainly not hiring or bribing humans.

>>c_cran+(OP)
LLMs are fairly capable physical agents already. Nothing large about the assumption at all. Not that a robotic threat is even necessary.

https://tidybot.cs.princeton.edu/

https://innermonologue.github.io/

https://palm-e.github.io/

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/autonomous-sy...

>>trasht+w6
Why would people want to give the power and prestige of an executive position to a computer program?

>>djur+Jv
If the superintelligence can increase the value more than a human, I suppose the owner don't care if the position is held by a human or an AI. Especially if the competitor is already run that way, and doing really well.

>>famous+Kg
I've yet to see a LLM that can punch me for disagreeing with it.

>>trasht+w6
I imagine some corporations might toy with the idea of letting a LLM or AI manage operations, but this would still be under some person's oversight. AIs don't have the legal means to own property.

>>djur+Jv
Because the humans overestimate the upside, underestimate the downside, and are often too lazy to check the output.

There's power and prestige in money, too, not just the positions.

Hence the lawyers who got in trouble for outsourcing themselves to ChatGPT: https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-us...

Or those t-shirts from a decade back: https://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/smallbusiness/tshirt-busine...

>>c_cran+uU1
There would probably be a board. But a company run by a superintelligent AI would quickly become so complex that the inner workings of the company would become a black box to the board.

And as long as the results improve year over year, they would have little incentive to make changes.

>>trasht+1v4
>But a company run by a superintelligent AI would quickly become so complex that the inner workings of the company would become a black box to the board.

The AI is still doing the job in the real world of allocating resources, hiring and firing people, and so on. It's not so complex as to be opaque. When an AI plays chess, the overall strategy might not be clear, but the actions it is doing are still obvious.

>>c_cran+Jm6
> The AI is still doing the job in the real world of allocating resources, hiring and firing people, and so on.

When we have superintelligence, the AI is not going to a hire a lot of people, only fire them.

And I fully expect the technical platform it runs on 50 years after the last human engineer is fired, is going to be as incomprehensible to humans as the complete codebase of Google is to a regular 10-year-old, at best.

The "code" it would be running might include some code written in a human readable programming language, but would probably include A LOT of logic hidden deep inside neural networks with parameter spaces many orders of magnitude greater than GPT-4.

And on the hardware side, the situation would be similar. Chips created by superintelligent AGI's are likely to be just as difficult to reverse engineer as the neural networks that created them.

>>trasht+TXd
The outputs that LLMs produce have never had a problem with being unrecognizable, only the inputs that went into making them. It's also inherently harder to obfuscate some things. Mass firing is obviously something that is done to reduce costs.