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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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While the idea of a superhumanly smart AI plowing through feeble human countermeasures is undeniably cool, as anyone who's read the first pages of A Fire upon the Deep can confirm, I think I'll agree with you that a runaway AI is unlikely. Even if we leave it running on the largest supercomputer instead of resurrecting a snapshot to give us an answer as we do now, it might run into the problem of not having enough computing resources to rewrite itself into a better AI that can convince its caretakers that giving him their AWS API keys is a smart idea or that can send viruses into the wild that steal these keys for it or that can fabricate something nefarious via a process not designed for that.

Yes, existential risk and all that, but I still drive my car, even though the probability of me dying in a car crash is much higher than being turned into paperclips.

agree. such concerns seem way overblown. People seem to forget that these things need to be plugged in...they need an external energy source. This is a huge limitation.