TL;DR: (AI-generated 🤖)
The author, an early pioneer in the field of aligning artificial general intelligence (AGI), expresses concern about the potential dangers of creating a superintelligent AI. They highlight the lack of understanding and control over modern AI systems, emphasizing the need to shape the preferences and behavior of AGI to ensure it doesn’t harm humanity. The author predicts that the development of AGI smarter than humans, with different goals and values, could lead to disastrous consequences. They stress the urgency and seriousness required in addressing this challenge, suggesting measures such as banning large AI training runs to mitigate the risks. Ultimately, the author concludes that humanity must confront this issue with great care and consideration to avoid catastrophic outcomes.
I don’t think I’m anthropromorphising, and I think the road construction example is what I was already talking about. It likely won’t care about us for good or bad. That’s the opposite of anthropromorphism. When we build roads maybe some ants are inadvertently killed, but part of the construction plan isn’t “destroy all ants on the Earth” Yes it can certainly cause harm, but there is a very large range of scenarios between “killed a few people” and “full on human genocide” and I have for many years seen people jump immediately to the extremes.
I think it’s besides the point but I disagree that an AI (which will be trained on the entirety of human knowledge) would not at least have a passing knowledge of human ethics and values, and while consciousness as we perceive it may not be required for intelligence, there is a point where, if it acts exactly as a conscious human would, the difference is largely semantic.