Paper clip optimizers always need a secondary (and often dubious) physical element to pose an actual threat, like grey goo or nanomachines or strange matter.
A path that will include an ever-more pervasive presence and influence of the next generation of this tech.
We failed with social media, and now we're plunging headlong into territory that's arguably far more treacherous and there's very little indication that we'll learn from the last time.
So now we're just starting to come to terms with the harms that we didn't see coming, while going 1000mph with a category of tech that has a myriad of foreseeable problems to say nothing of the ones we haven't thought of.
I hope there will be an equalizing positive effect, but there seem to be good reasons to worry.
That sentiment is part of society. Not sure if it could ever be changed.
- military industrial complexes
- questionably Democratic democracies, riddled by deception and lobbying
- a financial system that doesn't seem to be particularly constrained by the political system
- yet another major war underway, and another one on deck
- an epistemic & trust crisis
- major political polarization
- global cost of living crises
And we accomplished all of this in record time, with dumb computers!
Did I miss anything or is everything else more or less a-ok?
Though, I suspect you are like most people in that if you gaze into the unknown (which is what we are dealing with here), you will see what you want to see.
You see, the actual causality is unknowable, so your mind has generated a simulation of what "the" casualty is.
This is clearly obvious, is it not?
Even if it only gets as far as running a Ponzi or pyramid scheme — and there are plenty of those where the scheme itself is a small block of text that convinces those reading it to (1) share it, and (2) give money to the person who first showed them this message — still breaks economics bad enough to matter, even if you don't give any credence at all to Yudkowsky etc.
Or in a more literal sense of using humans, as each separate component of ordering the creation and delivery of a custom (non-computer) virus has been demonstrated, and the only good news is the bio-labs say no to printing the D/RNA for dangerous viruses and so do the LLMs that most noobs try to use.