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Notes -
About not being maximum doomer https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-of-a-doomer
About how is AI going to kill everyone - AI 2027
About how to make that AI will not to kill everyone - AI 2040
Defending Anthropic against MIRI https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/2042329870076637242
Anything else you are interested in?
thank you!
ehh still in the x-risk end of things. what i mean is- i guess if you're sold on fast takeoff the brief window where AI can be disastrous but not existential is so narrow as to be moot. but i'm not sold on that!
what i'm looking for is who's writing about, like, the French supermarket fridge hack or Stuxnet level of AI-powered disaster, or just one or two steps up from those. It's unknown who did the fridge hack (yet) but given the relatively low security levels of the equipment, it seems well within the capability range of near-frontier AI. Maybe Claude is 'aligned' enough that no one can jailbreak it into assisting, but open models are only ~6 months behind. Could one of them have been used?
Who's writing about the disasters possible now, or in six months, and how to take those seriously? The "big names"- at least the people I think of as the big names- all seem focused on existential risk, in part because of seriousness of infinite ethics, though I think in part because, frankly, writing sci-fi is way more fun. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places and I need to find some dry corporate report on network security.
How much of a food supply line shock could someone generate by getting their open-weight model on a Mac Mini to find a vulnerability in, say, Kroger's refrigeration management and crank the defrosters in 2700 stores? One of my pet fears is the physical vulnerability of electrical substations. How hard would it be to feed some map data to an AI and estimate a route to generate a cascading failure? I can't imagine the IT departments at water treatment plants are exactly robust, what kind of fresh hell could someone wreck with those?
I am worried about existential risk. But I'm much more worried about nearer-term non-existential risks like these.
There is https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026 and https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing
For a risk from open weights https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-questions-on-open-weights
For a picture of what the world look like - a slowdown scenario of AI 2040. Or you might find https://gwern.net/guardian-angel interesting.
danke!
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