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I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI.

The intersection of the two seems to be quite hard to find.

At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output.

This isn't a nuclear weapon. We're not going to accidentally create Skynet. The only thing it's going to go nuclear on is the market for jobs that are going to get automated in an economy that may not be ready for it.

If anything, the "danger" here is that AGI is going to be a printing press. A cotton gin. A horseless carriage -- all at the same time and then some, into a world that may not be ready for it economically.

Progress of technology should not be artitrarily held back to protect automateable jobs though. We need to adapt.

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Which of these statements do you disagree with?

- Superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity

- Predicting the future is famously difficult

- Given that uncertainty, we can't rule out the chance of our current AI approach leading to superintelligence

- Even a 1-in-1000 existential threat would be extremely serious. If an asteroid had a 1-in-1000 chance of hitting Earth and obliterating humanity we should make serious contingency plans.

Second question: how confident are you that you're correct? Are you 99.9% sure? Confident enough to gamble billions of lives on your beliefs? There are almost no statements about the future which I'd assign this level of confidence to.

Isn't the question you're posing basically Pascals wager?

I think the chance they're going to create a "superintelligence" is extremely small. That said I'm sure we're going to have a lot of useful intelligence. But nothing general or self-conscious or powerful enough to be threatening for many decades or even ever.

> Predicting the future is famously difficult

That's very true, but that fact unfortunately can never be used to motivate any particular action, because you can always say "what if the real threat comes from a different direction?"

We can come up with hundreds of doomsday scenarios, most don't involve AI. Acting to minimize the risk of every doomsday scenario (no matter how implausible) is doomsday scenario no. 153.

Yes, this is literally Pascal's wager / Pascal's mugging.

> I think the chance they're going to create a "superintelligence" is extremely small.

I'd say the chance that we never create a superintelligence is extremely small. You either have to believe that for some reason the human brain achieved the maximum intelligence possible, or that progress on AI will just stop for some reason.

Most forecasters on prediction markets are predicting AGI within a decade.

Why are you so sure that progress won't just fizzle out at 1/1000 of the performance we would classify as superintelligence?

> that progress on AI will just stop for some reason

Yeah it might. I mean, I'm not blind and deaf, there's been tremendous progress in AI over the last decade, but there's a long way to go to anything superintelligent. If incremental improvement of the current state of the art won't bring superintelligence, can we be sure the fundamental discoveries required will ever be made? Sometimes important paradigm shifts and discoveries take a hundred years just because nobody made the right connection.

Is it certain that every mystery will be solved eventually?

Aren't we already passed 1/1000th of the performance we would classify as superintelligence?

There isn't an official precise definition of superintelligence, but it's usually vaguely defined as smarter than humans. Twice as smart would be sufficient by most definitions. We can be more conservative and say we'll only consider superintelligence achieved when it gets to 10x human intelligence. Under that conservative definition, 1/1000th of the performance of superintelligence would be 1% as smart as a human.

We don't have a great way to compare intelligences. ChatGPT already beats humans on several benchmarks. It does better than college students on college-level questions. One study found it gets higher grades on essays than college students. It's not as good as humans on long, complex reasoning tasks. Overall, I'd say it's smarter than a dumb human in most ways, and smarter than a smart human in a few ways.

I'm not certain we'll ever create superintelligence. I just don't see why you think the odds are "extremely small".

I agree, the 1/1000 ratio was a bit too extreme. Like you said, almost any way that's measured it's probably fair to say chatgpt is already there.

You bring up the example of an extinction-level asteroid hurling toward earth. Gee, I wonder if this superintelligence you’re deathly afraid of could help with that?

This extreme risk aversion and focus on negative outcomes is just the result of certain personality types, no amount of rationalizing will change your mind as you fundamentally fear the unknown.

How do you get out of bed everyday knowing there’s a chance you could get hit by a bus?

If your tribe invented fire you’d be the one arguing how we can’t use it for fear it might engulf the world. Yes, humans do risk starting wildfires, but it’s near impossible to argue the discovery of fire wasn’t a net good.

Since the internet inception there were a few wrong turns taken by the wrong people (and lizards, ofc) behind the wheel, leading to the sub-optimal, enshitified tm experience we have today. I think GP just don't want to live through that again.

You mean right turns. The situation that we have today is the one that gets most rewarded. A right move is defined as one that gets rewarded.

I think of the invention of ASI as introducing a new artificial life form.

The new life form will be to humans, as humans are to chimps, or rats, or ants.

At this point we have lost control of the situation (the planet). We are no longer at the top of the food chain. Fingers crossed it all goes well.

It's an existential gamble. Is the gamble worth taking? No one knows.

> There are almost no statements about the future which I'd assign this level of confidence to.

You have cooked up a straw man that will believe anything as long as it contains a doomsday prediction. You are more than 99.9% confident about doomsday predictions, even if you claim you aren't.

> Superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity

I disagree at least on this one. I don't see any scenario where superintelligence comes into existence, but is for some reason limited to a mediocrity that puts it in contention with humans. That equilibrium is very narrow, and there's no good reason to believe machine-intelligence would settle there. It's a vanishingly low chance event. It considerably changes the later 1-in-n part of your comment.

So you assume a superintelligence, so powerful it would see humans as we see ants, would not destroy our habitat for resources it could use for itself?

More fundamental than that, I assume that a superintelligence on that level wouldn't have resource-contention with humans at all.

You could use the exact same argument to argue the opposite. Simply change the first premise to "Super intelligence is the only thing that can save humanity from certain extinction". Using the exact same logic, you'll reach the conclusion that not building superintelligence is a risk no sane person can afford to take.

So, since we've used the exact same reasoning to prove two opposite conclusions, it logically follows that this reasoning is faulty.

The best we can hope for is that Artificial Super Intelligence treats us kindly as pets, or as wildlife to be preserved, or at least not interfered with.

ASI to humans, is like humans to rats or ants.

That’s not how logic works. The GP is applying the precautionary principle: when there’s even a small chance of a catastrophic risk, it makes sense to take precautions-like restricting who can build superintelligent AI, similar to how we restrict access to nuclear technology.

Changing the premise to "superintelligence is the only thing that can save us" doesn’t invalidate the logic of being cautious. It just shifts the debate to which risk is more plausible. The reasoning about managing existential risks remains valid either way, the real question is which scenario is more likely, not whether the risk-based logic is flawed.

Just like with nuclear power, which can be both beneficial and dangerous, we need to be careful in how we develop and control powerful technologies. The recent deregulation by the US admin are an example of us doing the contrary currently.

Not really. If there is a small chance that this miraculous new technology will solve all of our problems with no real downside, we must invest everything we have and pull out all the stops, for the very future of the human race depends on AGI.

Also, @tsimionescu's reasoning is spot on, and exactly how logic works.

It literally isn't, changing/reversing a premise and not adressing the point that was made is not a valid way to counter the initial argument in a logical way.

Just like your proposition that any "small" chance justifies investing "everything" disregards the same argument regarding the precautionary principle of potentially devastating technologies. You've also slipped in an additonal "with no real downside" which you cannot predict with certainty anyways, rendering this argument infalsifiable. At least tsimionescu didn't dare making such a sweeping (but baseless) statement.

Some of us believe that continued AI research is by far the biggest threat to human survival, much bigger for example than climate change or nuclear war (which might cause tremendous misery and reduce the population greatly, but seem very unlikely to kill every single person).

I'm guessing that you think that society is getting worse every year or will eventually collapse, and you hope that continued AI research might prevent that outcome.

> Given that uncertainty, we can't rule out the chance of our current AI approach leading to superintelligence

I think you realise this is the weak point. You can't rule out the current AI approach leading to superintelligence. You also can't rule out a rotting banana skin in your bin spontaneously gaining sentience either. Does that mean you shouldn't risk throwing away that skin? It's so outrageous that you need at least some reason to rule it in. So it goes with current AI approaches.

Isn't the problem precisely that uncertainty though? That we have many data points showing that a rotting banana skin will not spontaneously gain sentience, but we have no clear way to predict the future? And we have no way of knowing the true chance of superintelligence arising from the current path of AI research—the fact that it could be 1-in-100 or 1-in-1e12 or whatever is part of the discussion of uncertainty itself, and people are biased in all sorts of ways to believe that the true risk is somewhere on that continuum.

There are lots of data points of previous AI efforts not creating super intelligence.

>And we have no way of knowing the true chance of superintelligence arising from the current path of AI research

What makes people think that the future advances in AI will continue to be linear instead of falling of and plateau? Don't all breakthrough technologies develop quickly at the start and then fall of in improvements as all the 'easy' improvements have already been made? In my opinion AI and AGI is like the car and the flying car. People saw continous improvements in cars and thought this rate of progress would continue indefinitely. Leading to cars that have the ability to not only drive but fly as well.

We already have flying cars. They’re called airplanes and helicopters. Those are limited by the laws of physics, so we don’t have antigravity flying vehicles.

In the case of AGI we already know it is physically possible.

> I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI.

Any of the signatories here match your criteria? https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk#signatories

Or if you’re talking more about everyday engineers working in the field, I suspect the people soldering vacuum tubes to the ENIAC would not necessarily have been the same people with the clearest vision for the future of the computer.

Sounds a little too much like, "It's not AGI today ergo it will never become AGI"

Does the current AI give productivity benefits to writing code? Probably. Do OpenAI engineers have exclusive access to more capable models that give them a greater productivity boost than others? Also probably.

If one exclusive group gets the benefit of developing AI with a 20% productivity boost compared to others, and they develop a 2.0 that grants them a 25% boost, then a 3.0 with a 30% boost, etc...

The question eventually becomes, "is AGI technically possible"; is there anything special about meat that cannot be reproduced on silicon? We will find AGI someday, and more than likely that discovery will be aided by the current technologies. It's the path here that matters, not the specific iteration of generative LLM tech we happen to be sitting on in May 2025.

> Does the current AI give productivity benefits to writing code? Probably.

> If one exclusive group gets the benefit of developing AI with a 20% productivity boost compared to others, and they develop a 2.0 that grants them a 25% boost, then a 3.0 with a 30% boost, etc...

That’s a bit of a stretch, generative AI is least capable of helping with novel code such as needed to make AGI.

If anything I’d expect companies working on generative AI to be at a significant disadvantage when trying to make AGI because they’re trying to leverage what they are already working on. That’s fine for incremental improvement, but companies rarely ride one wave of technology to the forefront of the next. Analog > digital photography, ICE > EV, coal mining > oil, etc.

The "novel AGI code" probably accounts for <5% of work by time spent. If they can reduce the remaining 95% of grunt work (wiring yet another DB query to a frontend, tweaking the build pipeline, automating GPU allocation scripts) then that means they can focus more on that 5%.

Then it looks like Company A spends 90% of time on novel research work (while LLMs do all the busy work) and Company B spends 5% of time on novel research work.

If it were that simple we’d already have AGI.

Just really think about what you just said, sure spend 5% of the time is on the bits nobody on earth has any idea how to accomplish that’s how people will approach this project. Organizationally the grunt work is a trivial rounding error vs the completely unbound we’ve got no idea how to solve this problems bits.

> At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output.

It was true before we allowed them to access external systems, disregarding certain rule which I forgot the origin.

The more general problem is a mix between the tradegy of the common; we have better understanding every passing day yet still don't understand exacly why LLM perform that well emergently instead of engineered that way; and future progress.

Do you think you can find a way around access boundaries to masquerade your Create/Update requests as Read in the log system monitoring it, when you have super intelligence?

> are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli

LLMs are huge pretrained models. The economic benefit here is that you don't have to train your own text classification model anymore. (The LLM was likely already trained on whatever training set you could think of.)

That's a big time and effort saver, but no different from "AI" that we had decades prior. It's just more accessible to the normal person now.

alignmentforum.com

> Progress of technology should not be artitrarily held back to protect automateable jobs though. We need to adapt.

So you don't mind if your economic value drops to zero, with all human labour replaced by machines?

Dependent on UBI, existing in a basic pod, eating rations of slop.

> So you don't mind if your economic value drops to zero, with all human labour replaced by machines?

This was the fear when the cotton gin was invented. It was the ear when cars were created. The same complaint happened with the introduction of electronic, automated, telephone switchboards.

Jobs change. Societies change. Unemployment worldwide, is near the lowest it has ever been. Work will change. Society will eventually move to a currency based on energy production, or something equally futuristic.

This doesn't mean that getting there will be without pain.

The goal for AGI/ASI is to create machines that can do any job much faster, better, and cheaper than humans. That's the ultimate end point of this progress.

The economic value of human labour will drop to zero. That would be an existential threat to our civilization.

Where did all the work-horses go? Why is there barely a fraction of the population there once was? Why did they not adapt and find niches where they had a competitive advantage over cars and machines?

The horses weren't the market the economy is selling to, the people are. Ford figured out that people having both time and money is best for the economy. We'll figure out that having all the production capabilities but none of the market benefits nobody.

Yes! Sounds like a dream. My value isn't determined by some economic system, but rather by myself. There is so much to do when you don't have to work. Of course, this assumes we actually get to UBI first, and it doesn't create widespread poverty. But even if humanity will have to go through widespread poverty, we'd porbably come out with UBI on the other side (minus a few hundred millions starved).

There's so much to do, explore and learn. The prospect of AI stealing my job is only scary because my income depends on this job.

> There's so much to do, explore and learn.

Hobbies, hanging out with friends, reading, etc. That's basically it.

Probably no international travel.

It will be like a simple retirement on a low income, because in a socialist system the resources must be rationed.

This will drive a lot of young ambitious people to insanity. Nothing meaningful for them to achieve. No purpose. Drug use, debauchery, depression, violence, degeneracy, gangs.

It will be a true idiocracy. No Darwinian selection pressures, unless the system enforces eugenics and population control.

Wait, wait, wait. Our society's gonna fall apart due to a lack of Darwinian selection pressure? What do you think we're selecting for right now?

Seems to me like our culture treats both survival and reproduction as an inalienable right. Most people would go so far as to say everyone deserves love, "there's a lid for every pot".

> This will drive a lot of young ambitious people to insanity. Nothing meaningful for them to achieve.

Maybe, if the only flavor of ambition you're aware of is that of SV types. Plenty of people have found achievement and meaning before and alongside the digital revolution world.

I mean common people will be affected just as badly as SV types. It will impact everyone.

Jobs, careers, real work, all replaced by machines which can do it all better, faster, cheaper than humans.

Young people with modest ambitions to learn and master a skill and contribute to society, and have a meaningful life. That can be blue collar stuff too.

How will children respond to the question - "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

They can join the Amish communities where humans still do the work.

> Hobbies, hanging out with friends, reading, etc. That's basically it. > It will be like a simple retirement on a low income [...].

Yes, like retirement but without the old age. Right now I'm studying, so I do live on a very low income. But still, there are so many interesting things! For example, I'm trying to design a vacuum pump to 1mbar to be made of mostly 3d printed parts. Do vacuum pumps exist and can I buy them? Absolutely. But is it still fun to do the whole designing process? You bet. And I can't even start explaining all the things I'm learning.

> This will drive a lot of young ambitious people to insanity.

I teach teenagers in the age where they have to choose their profession. The ones going insane will be the unambitious people, those who just stay on TikTok all day and go to work because what else would they do? The ambitious will always have ideas and projects. And they won't mind creating something that already exists, just because they like the process of it.

We already see this with generative AI. Even though you could generate most of the images you'd want already, people still enjoy the process of painting or photographing. Humans are made to be creative and take pleasure from it, even if it is not economically valuable.

Hell, this is Hacker News. Hacking (in its original sense) was about creativity and problem-solving. Not because it will make you money, but because it was interesting and fun.

Introverted high IQ nerds are a tiny percentage of the world population. We exist in a tiny bubble here in Hacker News.

I am thinking about society as a whole, how it will affect all types of people and cultures on this planet.

There is nothing "introverted high IQ nerd" about being creative. Think about everyone that is practicing music, artistry, crafts, rhetoric, cooking, languages, philosophy, writing, gardening, carpentry, and whatever you can think of. Most of them don't do it for money.

> [...] how it will affect all types of people and cultures on this planet.

Some will definitely feel without purpose. But I'd argue that just having a job so that you have a purpose is just a band-aid, not a real solution. I won't say that purposelessness isn't a problem, just that it would be great to actually address the issue.

Granted, I do hold a utopic view. I continue to be curious due to my religious belief, where I'm looking forward to life unconstrained by age. Regardless whether this will manifest, I think it is healthy to remain curious and continue learning. So on "how it will affect all types of people": I really do think that people without purpose need to engage in curiosity and creativity, for their own mental health.

Yes a few of us will enjoy the peaceful life of contemplation like Aristotle, but not everyone is genetically wired that way.

Introverts are only 25% - 40% of the population, and most people are not intellectually or artistically gifted (whether introvert or not), but they still want to contribute and feel valued by society.

> I'd argue that just having a job so that you have a purpose

It's not just about having a job. It's having an important or valuable role in society, feeling that your contributions actually matter to others - such as building or fixing things that others depend on, or providing for a family,

What would motivate a young boy to go through years of schooling, higher education, and so on, just to become a hobbyist, tinkering around on projects that no one else will ever use or really need? That may be acceptable for some niche personality types but not the majority.

Aspiring engineers or entrepreneurs are not merely motivated by having a job.

I am envisioning the AGI or ASI scenario which truly overtakes humans in all intellectual and physical capabilities, essentially making humans obsolete. That would smash the foundations and traditions of our civilization. It's an incredible gamble.

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