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Nearly all of us also want GoF shut down, to be clear.
There is, however, some significant difference between "a vaccine-resistant smallpox pandemic", as bad as that would be, and the true final form of bioweapons that a superintelligent AI could possibly access.
The absolute best-case of what that looks like, as in "we know 100% that this can be done, we just don't know how yet" is an incompatible-biochemistry alga with reduced need for phosphate and a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO (we know RuBisCO is hilariously bad by the standards of biochemistry; C4 and CAM plants have extensive workarounds for how terrible it is because natural selection can't just chuck it out and start over). Release this, it blooms like crazy across the whole face of the ocean (not limited to upwelling zones; natural algae need the dissolved phosphate in those, but CHON can be gotten from water + air), zooplankton don't bloom to eat it because of incompatible biochemistry, CO2 levels drop to near-zero because of better carbon fixation, all open-air crops fail + Snowball Earth. Humanity would probably survive for a bit, but >99% of humans die pretty quickly - and of course the AI that did it is possibly still out there, so focussing only on subsistence plausibly gets you knocked over by killer robots a few years later.
Medium-case is grey goo.
Worst-case is "zombie wasps for humans"/"Exsurgent Virus"; an easily-spread infection that makes human victims intelligently work to spread it. To be clear, this means it's in every country within a week of Patient Zero due to airports, and within a couple more weeks it's worked its way up to the top ranks of government officials as everyone prioritises infecting their superiors. Good. Luck. With. That.
It is possible for things, like normal GoF, to be extremely bad and yet still be a long way from the true, horrifying potential of the field.
I’m more sanguine about this stuff now, and not because it’s wrong. It’s because there are essentially an infinity of ways for super intelligent ASI to wipe out the human race - these are just the ways we can think of, and it’s going to be much smarter than us. If it happens, it’ll happen anyway, any safeguards will be redundant. It’s like trusting a bear with the possibility space for killing a fox or something - it can come up with a method (and a feasible one), but it’s one of a thousand ways a smart human could come up with.
I mean, yeah, obviously the solution to AI risk is to not build hostile superhuman AI. Just pointing it out.
@RandomRanger I figure this does double duty as a reply to you.
Agreed. But unfortunately...
Superhuman AI is probably an inevitable consequence of the evolution of intelligence. There is a good chance the solution to the FERMI thing is staring us in the face / we’re about to find out.
If you mean the Fermi Paradox, it's... complicated. If you're talking about the Great Filter, no, AI catastrophe cannot be the Great Filter because the AI itself still counts as being an alien civilisation for Fermi Paradox purposes.
To get AI being an answer to the Fermi Paradox, you have to go into Doomsday Argument territory, and also assume FTL. I laid out the case you can make here. Whether to take Doomsday Arguments seriously is dubious.
Only if we assume that AI not only shares the broad goals of human civilization (expansion, growth, conquest of space) but executes them effectively. Smart humans still makes mistakes. Smart ASI is still likely to make mistakes, and even if it does so much less frequently those mistakes are likely to be far greater in consequence.
Imagine a global benevolent ASI designed to achieve human flourishing that accidentally exterminates the human race. This sounds ridiculous but is perfectly possible and perhaps even likely on a long enough timeframe because of the extreme power such an ASI might possess. This is a closed loop solution to the Fermi paradox. An ASI might even develop a moribund or nihilistic tendency that leads to the above with no desire for recovery (by eg. cloning or remaking human civilization).
Paperclip maximisers do, and are a notoriously easy-to-specify goal system.
You need the malevolent AIs to also commit suicide for dubious reasons for this to be a Great Filter, unless alignment is so hilariously easy that there aren't any.
Only if the all powerful malevolent AI specifically wants to conquer the universe and therefore expands forever (or until it encounters resistance). What if it has other goals (programmed or organic), like some kind of anti-pollution or even conservation-type instincts where it doesn’t want to fill up the universe with mechanical metal garbage for no real reason other than maximizing energy production to make more energy? If you’re smart enough to relatively accurately simulate reality, you no longer need to explore and expand in the same way. A smart enough paperclip maximizer might simulate the paperclips and consider that sufficient.
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