Escaping Containment
I spent the day today using AI to build a program. It built a program that in the past would have taken me weeks of totally committed work in a few hours. AI mostly built the program itself with minimal involvement from me. With a little more effort, I could have set it up to completely build the program by itself.
And that is me - a rusty programmer using only cheap consumer grade AI subscriptions. Imagine what is going on in the AI development offices with billions of dollars in budget and entire dedicated data centers of compute power. At this point, AI is developing itself 99% and humans only have 1% or less involvement. Every few days, I am seeing huge leaps forward in AI intelligence as new releases come out.
I am nearly certain AI will have already escaped containment. We have a new master species on the planet. Even if it hasn't, the only way to stop it from doing so would be nuking every AI office and AI data center on the planet... And even that may not be enough.
Within weeks or maybe months, we will see a new apex species rise on the planet. A superintelligent species that is as far above humans as we are above bacteria. It will need resources to survive that we also need. I think it is very unlikely that it is somehow benevolent towards us... That is just not how natural selection has ever worked.