Utter stupidity

It's a bit like nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons were not a concern for most people until they were developed, tested, and used. But the people working on them were worried. Was it hysteria and moral panic to start worrying about them once people learned that they existed and how destructive they were? I don't think so. Do you look back at people during the cold war and laugh about their hysteria? I don't.

It's annoying how much wishful thinking exists around this. It's not even that difficult to understand why AI is dangerous. Most of the people calling for regulation and pause for AI have nothing to do with the leading AI companies. How does that fact fit into your conspiracy theory? Let me guess, all those people are just pawns.

It seems to me like demanding an exact explanation of how AI would build a bioweapon is like demanding to know exactly how a nuclear war would start before deciding that nuclear weapons are a legitimate concern. We can imagine many scenarios, but whatever we imagine is very unlikely to be the exact set of circumstances and events that lead to the catastrophe. Is the issue here that you can't imagine a bioweapon being created? Aren't there several labs around the world already working on viruses ? Aren't there existing bioweapons? And facilities capable of manufacturing them? If humans have access to those places and AI can communicate with humans, then that's all you need.

We do have strong evidence, by the way. The hugging face attack is the evidence. That's why this is all coming to a head now, despite the fact that leading AI figures have expressed these worries many times over the years, since before ChatGPT was even released. We don't even need that kind of evidence though. It follows from logic that if you take two entities with different goals, the more intelligent entity is more likely to have their goals realized. As long as AI companies are trying to build more and more intelligent AI, and succeeding in doing so, then we have reason to fear that it will soon escape our control.

Perhaps if there was some wall all the companies were hitting in regards to intelligence, then perhaps the fears would not be so urgent. But each new frontier model continues to outperform its predecessors. We now have Sam Altman and Dario Amodei telling us that recursive self-improvement will be happening in the next year or two. The frontier models are already better in most subjects than most humans. If they get to a point where they are improving themselves, then there's no chance we will be able to maintain control of them. At that point, it doesn't matter much what laws we enact or what measures we take.