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As for 3, we're already hooking up GPT to information sources and resources.
Seriously, once AI becomes about as useful as humans, the rest of your questions could be answered by "why would the king give anyone weapons if he's afraid of a coup?" or "why would North Koreans put a horrible dictator into power?"
No doomers care about sentience or consciousness, only capabilities. And lots of doomers worry about slow loss of control, just like natives once the colonists arrive. A good analogy for AGI is open borders with a bunch of high-skilled immigrants willing to work for free. Even if they assimilate really well, they'll end up taking over almost all the important positions because they'll do a better job than us.
Come on, you're equivocating between us dying of old age and human extinction.
I'm not a transhumanist or immortalist, I'm not worried about slowing machine learning because of people dying from illnesses or old age. I'm worried about human extinction from extraplanetary sources like an asteroid ML could identify and help us stop. Without machine learning we can't expand into space and ultimately become a spacefaring race and if we don't get off the rock humanity will go extinct.
Right, now you're equivocating between ML and AGI. We don't need AGI do stop asteroids (which are very rare) nor for spacefaring, although I agree they'd make those tasks easier.
I beg you to please consider the relative size of risks. "There are existential risks on both sides" is true of literally every decision anyone will ever make.
That's not what I'm doing. I'm criticizing the assumptions made by the doomsday arguers.
Those like Yudkowsky and now Roko justify tyrannical measures on the first and wholly unevidenced belief that when computers exceed an arbitrary threshold of computational power they will spontaneously gain key AGI traits. If they are right, there is nothing we can do to stop this without a global halt on machine learning and the development of more powerful chips. However, as their position has no evidence for that first step, I dismiss it out of hand as asinine.
We don't know what it will look like when a computer approaches possession of those AGI traits. If we did, we would already know how to develop such computers and how to align them. It's possible the smartest human to ever live will reach maturation in the next few decades and produce a unified theory of cognition that can be used to begin guided development of thinking computers. The practical belief is we will not solve cognition without machine learning. If we need machine learning to know how to build a thinking computer, but machine learning runs the risk of becoming thinking of its own accord, what do we do?
So we stop, and then hopefully pick it up as quickly as possible when we've deemed it safe enough? Like nuclear power? After all that time for ideological lines to be drawn?
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