I am asking you, politely, to give me a realistic doom senario. I am too dumb to connect the dots and will crash into the wall. Please do it for me.
If you don't believe in international conflict as a driving scenario, instead think about simple human greed and hubris. Citing myself:
> If AI gets intelligent enough, it will be incredible useful to connect to real world machinery. Think about how much cheaper building houses could be, if all the labor would be close to free. In general, dirt cheap, competent and abundant labor would revolutionize all parts of the economy. People are already trying out near autonomous AI companies today. When AI gets intelligent and cheap enough, no human-led company can compete with AI-led companies. When AI gets competent enough with real world interactions, human blue collar work can't compete. Imagine economic growth not in the single digits, but 80% or 300%. Countries not participating in (reckless) AI growth will quickly be left by the wayside. At this point, we don't even need to allure to military concerns to see how human oversight gets sidelined.
> All of this is only ("only") contingent on sufficiently intelligent and cheap AI. If you don't accept this premise, the rest doesn't follow. (There are multiple arguments, why this could be, but that is another discussion.)
> If you accept the premise, how would AI 'extinct' humanity? With 99%+ of the economy under AI control, the possibilities are endless. And given its enormous GDP, cheap to accomplish. Probably even for a single AI company in the above scenario. Killer drones? Engineered virus? Poisoned water supply? Let your creativity run wild. You just need an entity that is persistent and well-resourced to reach every last human settlement.
> The why is a question about alignment (and out of scope of this comment). As a simple comparison, humans are only mildly aligned with preserving nature. It takes up so much space, protecting it takes an annoying amount of resources, etc.
That comment specifically addresses the timeline, but you can remove the timeline and I believe the critique still holds up. Wake me up when AI is making order of magnitude improvements in _anything_ physical: see the "Moravec's Paradox" comment at the bottom.
> near autonomous AI companies today
That's the thing though. "near" autonomous. Humans have alpha, and that matters in a free market. If people have (more or less) equal access to (more or less) frontier intelligence, it's the alpha the individual brings to the market that is rewarded. In other words, if everyone is super, no one is. The market rewards a company that stands out from the rest, and as long as humans provide value, a pure-AI company cannot stand out.
To be clear, I don't know how long this will be the case. But once there _is_ a company that can be pure AI, then that's literal AGI. I would be curious what kind of company it would be; if its in software, then its an AI company that would be able to take on Microsoft/Google/Nvidia/Salesforce/Oracle and _win_. I think that's a tall order, but perhaps I'm not imaginative enough.
> With 99%+ of the economy under AI control
Do you think we're post-RSI at this point? Because if so, I agree. If not, I have trouble seeing how AI could control 99% of the economy without it.
My only claim is that pre-RSI, pdoom is zero. Post RSI, then obviously the first thing to ask the genie is to put itself in a bottle. And you can't predict how it will answer.
Western civilization is already on the verge of collapse, people's general ignorance or indifference on the matter notwithstanding.
When you use AI to increase profit margins, by replacing humans with it for instance, you accelerate a system that's headed for the wall already. Our control systems and resilience are already overtaxed, that acceleration would ensure them breaking completely.
What exactly about AI makes it tax our control systems and resilience? What would it mean to make the system not "head for the wall"? Honestly this is rather vague. You could replace "AI" with "CaPiTAlIsM" and it would still parse. (Another way of me saying you're being vague.)
Several bright sparks, decide the Ilands model is a great idea, and launch a bunch of Bots to create a "self sustaining AI civilization".
Bots can find themselves and coordinate, or they can actually find self sustaining methods of token generation. Who knows, they might decide to fight the loneliness epidemic.
We can get to a simulation finding a way to self sustain its funding.
From here, I'd have to apply myself to figure out what the rest of the escalation pathway is, but at least I have managed to gain some bed of compute and funding and lacking oversight.
This is a hypothetical of course, there are probably several ways this can be made tighter and holes that can be identified. We aren't even leaning heavily on human stupidity so far.
If its pre-RSI, then we already have Ilands and its a big nothing burger? There's no (likely) path of escalation from an AI social network to bioweapons or them hacking POTUS's nuclear codes? That's a very big leap and if you want to support your claims I would be willing to listen; but I'm not seeing it.