This assessment of the timeline is quite telling. If supersonic flight posed an existential threat to humanity, we certainly should have been thinking about how to mitigate it in 1925.
Both the USA and Nazi Germany benefited massively from have a civilian industrial base that was complementary to military production.
Would you shut down the powerhouse of our economy -- travel, transportation, energy -- for something hypothetical that hasn't even happened and doesn't appear to be close to happening?
I'm pro-clean energy, but you can't do without fossil fuels. Not if you want society to keep climbing up and up and up.
"The current rate of sea level rise at Pensacola Bay has accelerated rapidly since 2010."
"The difference in sea level rise over the last 100 years has been approximately 10 inches—but in the next 75-100 years, the increase in sea level rise could be close to 48 inches." https://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/escambiaco/2023/04/12/weekly-what...
AI is quite troublesome for privacy though. How much privacy humans need is a question we'll probably have answered the hard way.
Another thing the technical geniuses tend to be good at is exploiting the power they suddenly obtain in their own interest, either directly or with regulations and collusion with those who hold actual hard power.
Evil AI owners seem to be much closer and far more material than an evil AI, and coincidentally it's something that is almost entirely lacking from the discourse, as public attention is too focused on sci-fi hypotheticals.
You can't fight what you can't even see, let alone not sure if it exists at all. You don't invent a pair of wings because 1900s' you thinks that "the scientists will invent an anti-aging cure in the next decade, and surely personal flight will be ubiquitous in 2000's". You don't design a plasma gun for your Mars landing just in case you land in a city between Martian canals and see an army of little green men there. The world doesn't work like that, by the time you reach the Mars surface the context will be wildly different. You get burned and put guardrails, maybe. Not the other way around. Nobody can see through higher order effects, no matter how smart they are. And as the threat becomes progressively more clear there will be more caution, if needed. Premature optimization yada yada.
What actually happens right now is everybody and my aunt seriously discussing the evil robots that will come and kill us. That's pure mass hysteria, caused by the scaremongering and the cult-like beliefs of very smart people with disproportional influence who can't contain their own conjectures and bullshit in the realm of science fiction.
On the other hand,the end goal of OpenAI is the major job replacement, according to their current charter. [1] "Broadly distributed"... will they distribute their utopia to North Korea? Not happening, isn't it? I think it's obvious that if the actual job replacement rate will ever get anywhere close to the levels of late 19th early 20th century industrialization, this will produce major societal shifts and struggles, wealth and power redistribution, and a lot of blood and wars. Because the dependence on your job is the only ephemeral influence you (as a worker) have on this world. And of course, the companies that control the AI will be gatekeepers, and they will be more than happy to close the open research and open source models, and pull the regulation ladder and lie in bed with politicians and military, like OpenAI already does for years, of course they realize that and their utopical self-contradicting "charter" is nothing more than marketing hogwash that they already changed and will change in the future.
This is far more realistic and will happen much earlier than the rogue AI science fiction, if happens at all. In fact it's slowly happening now, and it's not talked about nearly enough, because the attention is mostly misdirected onto the vague superhuman AI red herring.
Like, "What exactly will happen? How exactly will it happen?" is worth discussing if and only if one party seriously believes they can convince the other that none of the imaginable scenarios are even remotely plausible; and if we assume that there is at least one scenario where we can say "I'm 99% certain it won't happen and 1% it could" then that discussion is pretty much over, the existential risk is plausible (and the consequences of that are so much incomparably larger than e.g. major job displacement that it justifies attention even if it's many orders of magnitude less likely) and we should instead talk about how to prevent it.
I'm not making the argument that the existence of stronger-than-human general AI will result in a catastrophe, but I am asserting that the mere existence of a stronger-than-human general AI (without some controls we currently can't figure out how to make or even if they are possible) carries at least some plausible chance of existential risk - for the sake or argument, let's say at least 1%; and I am asserting that a 1% of existential risk is a totally absolutely unacceptably high risk that must not be allowed to happen, because it is far more important[1] than e.g 100% certainty of major job displacement and social unrest.
"Will the world do nothing until that moment?" I think that what we saw from the global reaction to things like start of Covid-19 or climate change is completely sufficient to assume that we can't rely on the world stopping a major-but-stoppable issue in a timely manner, so "surely the world will do something" is not a sufficiently convincing argument to discount the risk; I don't think you can plausibly deny that even for a clearly catastrophic problem there is at least a 10% chance that the world could still delay sufficient action until it's too late; and this means that it doesn't really matter what the exact likelihood of that is based on society, politics, military aspects, we should work with the assumption that the world actually might do nothing to prevent any specific scenario from unfolding, and we should de-risk it in other ways.
[1] Looking at other posts, perhaps this is where we'd disagree, and in that case it's probably the core of the discussion which also doesn't really depend on any details of specific scenarios.
The key difference between powerful alien invaders and us creating a powerful alien entity that we can't control is that the former either will or won't happen due to external circumstances, but the latter is something we would be doing to ourselves and can avoid if we choose to.
Q.E.D.
A thing does not require intent or consciousness to be dangerous. How many chemists have blown themselves up because they didn't realize an experiment was dangerous? How many production systems have crashed because the developer didn't accurately predict what the code they wrote will do?
Alkali metals and C++ code do not require ill intent, but they will still obliterate your limbs / revenue if you build and use them wrong.
One of my more tangible hypotheses is a sort of runaway effect. Economic, geopolitical, and military competitive pressures will quickly push out anyone and anything that still relies on last era human-in-the-loop processes, the same way any organization that doesn't utilize artificial lighting, electricity, and instant communication will obviously be left far behind. You have to just trust that the machine running stock market transactions will do its math right.
But unlike transaction software failure modes, which quickly result in outright crashes or verifiably incorrect errors, failure modes of non-bayesian decision making software probably looks something like what happens when existing economic, geopolitical, and military decision-makers make decisions that are harmful, unethical, or otherwise undesirable for humanity. This time augmented with, if not superhuman intelligence, at least superhuman speed and superhuman knowledge breadth.
Very cute for hobby projects, a huge liability for commercial projects.
Use as many training wheels there as humanly possible, please.
But Stockholm syndrome I guess. :P
Society exists because cooperation outperforms the alternatives. If you have human level AI at some point there is no benefit to cooperation and a major incentive to prevent anyone else gaining access to equal/better AI.
AI itself does not need to have any motivation - people in charge have plenty of incentives to eliminate the rest once they don't need them anymore.
If you make enough varied AIs, some will have self-replicating behavior, just like if you make enough random proteins, some will self-replicate.
The fact that you make insinuations about what I think is pretty aggressive and terrible similarly, this forum ought to have better manners than that when writing replies to complete strangers. Not everyone who has a different opinion is some crypto conspiracy theorist, and you are wrong to jump to such a suggestion.
He won a Turing award for his work on deep learning.
Lots of people reasonably disagree with him about the future of AI/ML, but he's the opposite of ignorant.