Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI is conscious. I know he's extremely accomplished and all, but as it pertains to AI as it exists now we're miles apart (not to say that he's not brilliant, but by difference of opinion). I also don't want to rehash the whole what-is-consciousness philosophical debate, and actually it's a separate question anyway, something doesn't have to be conscious to be dangerous. So I'll stick to the danger bit.
Do you use AI much? Not a trick question. What is your usage like? Reason I ask is recall OpenAI hyping GPT-2 with the same language as they are these new models. Doom and gloom. It sells. It gets attention. But use these systems enough and you start to become very familiar with their capabilities, and they are just so limited, and that's not even talking about how they lose the thread on long tasks. I understand that agency expands that a little, but not by much, really. When you use these systems a lot, it tends to be easier to see through the hype.
The real threat is, and will be for some time I think, people. Guard rails are not for AI. Guard rails are for people. All of this talk we are seeing in this space, this security chip being no exception, is treating a symptom, not a cause. People are what we should be focusing on, how, I have no idea, I couldn't even begin to guess how, but I can at least see that the actual issue is that the first thing some people want to do with it is cause harm and havoc. There is our sign. And we are trying to moderate the capabilities of the tool that can do harm in bad hands at a granular level when that means also moderating the same thing that can do good in that same tool. We aren't trying to moderate the hands that are handling the tool. And we need to be doing more of that. Any time we misapply constraints and focus on the shadow of the thing, and not the object casting the shadow, we are always going to be one step behind, whether it's AI or anything else. So I don't attribute the dangers of AI to AI itself, I attribute it to people.
Additionally, on AI building AI and AI just wiping us out; AI can do that for itself for rule-based things, up to god level I reckon. Things like Go, etc. And to be fair, AI research is partly like that, code either runs or it doesn't, so I get why that paper is worried. But where it needs data to actually succeed, it is limited by the amount of data that exists. And we, us, people, are who creates that data. AI and humans have more of a symbiotic relationship than people seem to realize. There are several papers that go into detail on this:
Models trained on their own output degrade: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y
They need fresh real data every generation or they go downhill: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01850
Reusing the same data loses value after a few passes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16264
And the stock of human-written text is finite: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.04325
So it's not that I think it's 0%. I just think the explosion story underrates how much it still needs us, and that the damage in the near term is going to come from people, not the AI deciding on its own.