> Not hypothetical malicious AI interpretation of benign intent.
(Dispassionate is the risk, rather than malicious. The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, you are simply made of atoms it can use for something else).
This is alien to me. Do bugs suddenly not exist? Do the AI we already have never perform irreversible delirious actions, limited only to the small scale by virtue of where they're getting deployed? Do the humans deploying them always correctly gauge their capabilities and put in appropriate guard systems to ensure bad outcomes are caught before they become terminal?
Because this sounds nothing like the world I have lived in for my whole life.
> The more likely, and possibly even inevitable, dystopia is one in which AI is just an extremely effective tool malignant actors will use to control the masses.
Could well be more likely. But much the same applies: systems have bugs. The bugs in AI systems aren't even things we can engineer like we do with normal code, because everything's (currently) getting done with a big pile of barely interpretable weight multiply-accumulate-nonlinearity-threshold functions.
Any AI sufficiently well made to enable a dictatorship, is also sufficiently well made to have solved all the alignment problems of "malicious AI interpretation of benign intent". Which is IMO harder than "dispassionate about the dangers AI interpretation of benign intent".