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Otherwise-rational and moral people do bad things at the behest of powerful superintelligences with vast resources all the time. We call them “corporations,” a

Otherwise-rational and moral people do bad things at the behest of powerful superintelligences with vast resources all the time. We call them “corporations,” and they can convince bright-eyed college graduates to do just about anything. Now, the corporations aren’t deliberately trying to destroy humanity, but they do lots of things that point in that direction. An artificial superintelligence would be able to do the same thing. We just have no way of knowing whether it would deliberately try to destroy humanity. One thing that the AI doom discourse reveals is just how comfortable people allowed themselves to feel in the pre-AI world. There’s this belief that AI creates a risk of human extinction in the near-term which did not exist before. I think it’s telling that many of the leading lights of this movement are in their 20s or early 30s - too young to remember the Cold War. The truth is, we were never safe, and if all of the GPUs on earth were zapped out of existence right now, we still wouldn’t be safe. Life is random and chaotic and violent for most people most of the time, and we all just find ways to get through it. I suspect it will be much the same if an artificial superintelligence arises. Maybe it will kill a bunch of us, maybe it will kill all of us, but anyone who remains will eventually convince themselves that everything is okay.

FabHK 12d ago
Sure, the world was never safe for individuals, and even entire civilisations have gone extinct. For climate change and even nuclear weapons, most of humanity might perish, but there's the hope that some will survive. So, in the past humanity was not in a position to extinguish humanity as a whole.
- arctic-true 12d ago
  I guess I don’t see why “everyone will die” should scare me more than “almost everyone, including me, will die but someone somewhere might survive in a barely-habitable world.” And this is where I think some of the problem comes from. A lot of AI doomers swam in the same waters as transhumanists, life extension enthusiasts, etc. and got very good at pretending that they were never going to die, or that they would live for a massively superhuman lifespan such that they did not need to think about death. AI doom is much scarier - and thus much more worth posting about - if it represents the first time you’re grappling with your own mortality, as I suspect it is for a lot of younger people in this space.
- giardini 12d ago
  Civilizations do not go extinct - species go extinct. And even that isn't as bad as it sounds: many genetic traits remain from extinct species and still contribute to the well-being of other species.

FabHK 12d ago

Sure, the world was never safe for individuals, and even entire civilisations have gone extinct. For climate change and even nuclear weapons, most of humanity might perish, but there's the hope that some will survive. So, in the past humanity was not in a position to extinguish humanity as a whole.

arctic-true 12d ago
I guess I don’t see why “everyone will die” should scare me more than “almost everyone, including me, will die but someone somewhere might survive in a barely-habitable world.” And this is where I think some of the problem comes from. A lot of AI doomers swam in the same waters as transhumanists, life extension enthusiasts, etc. and got very good at pretending that they were never going to die, or that they would live for a massively superhuman lifespan such that they did not need to think about death. AI doom is much scarier - and thus much more worth posting about - if it represents the first time you’re grappling with your own mortality, as I suspect it is for a lot of younger people in this space.
giardini 12d ago
Civilizations do not go extinct - species go extinct. And even that isn't as bad as it sounds: many genetic traits remain from extinct species and still contribute to the well-being of other species.