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Comment by bglazer | Hacker News Reader

That’s a political question. It would require maintaining popular resistance to giving over all critical segments of the economy to AI. Of course that would be difficult, given the short term gains that would bring, but people seem pretty good at hanging on to ideology at their own expense.

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Long ago, people a lot like you were saying we should go ahead with AI research, but we shouldn't do anything dangerous like giving the AI access to the internet or giving it the ability to write and run computer programs. (Giving it the ability to run code was back then considered dangerous because it might create an AI with the same goals it has, only more capable, then that second AI might use its novel capabilities to create an even more capable third AI, and so on.)

There was also the idea of building a question-answering machine that just answers questions, but doesn't plan or try to achieve any goals, so it would be safe (the theory went). But notice that one of the early things built on top of GPT was Auto-GPT, which tries to achieve goals (set it by the user) and if there was any "popular resistance" to Auto-GPT I am not aware of it.

But I guess you would reply that those were obviously bad ideas, whereas your idea is a good idea -- your idea of hoping that no one gives a dangerously-capable AI access to any robots. Not only it is a good idea (according to you) but it such an obviously good idea that popular resistance will be galvanized as soon as someone tries to give any AI that might be very capable access to any robots.

First, you're the popular resistance to AI research. The movement already exists and is already prominent enough to be written up in the New Yorker. If your response is that the resistance is just a small set of people in SF, then I would refer you to the resistance to a much less capable class of systems: generative image models. Artists are having their livelihood (partially) disrupted by AI and they've been quite vigorous in defending themselves through both legal means and public relations. This kind of popular opposition to rapid automation is basically guaranteed given that the gains from such a system would be extremely concentrated in our current social-economic system.

It's hard to think of a quick takeover scenario, starting in near present day conditions, that doesn't involve absolutely earth-shattering social and economic re-arrangements. Every factory worker loses their job because we've handed over all material production to robots, and you imagine that there's no political constituency fighting against that change?

Remember, we're talking about a near complete destruction of humanity here. Sustaining the infrastructure to support a massive AI doesn't require just a few robots, it would need to fully replace large percentages of the entire world economy, and you think no one would notice or care?

I don't want to rely on this theory, exactly, but it's a very plausible outcome, and exactly the kind of homeostatic process that I would expect to exist.

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