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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30036 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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If you're arguing about why AI will kill us all, yes, you need to establish that it is indeed going to be superhuman and alien to us in a way that will be hard to predict.

I don't even think you need to do this. Even if the AI is merely as smart and charismatic as an exceptionally smart and charismatic human, and even if the AI is perfectly aligned, it's still a significant danger.

Imagine the following scenario:

  1. The AI is in the top 0.1% of human IQ.

  2. The AI is in the top 0.1% of human persuasion/charisma.

  3. The AI is perfectly aligned. It will do whatever its human "master" commands and will never do anything its human "master" wouldn't approve of.

  4. A tin-pot dictator such as Kim Jong Un can afford enough computing hardware to run around 1000 instances of this AI.

An army of 1000 genius-slaves who can work 24/7 is already an extremely dangerous thing. It's enough brain power for a nuclear weapons program. It's enough for a bioweapons program. It's enough to run a campaign of trickery, blackmail, and hacking to obtain state secrets and kompromat from foreign officials. It's probably enough to launch a cyberwarfare campaign that would take down global financial systems. Maybe not quite sufficient to end the human race, but sufficient to hold the world hostage and threaten catastrophic consequences.

Bioweapons, kompromat, and cyberwarfare are probably doable. Nukes require a lot of expensive physical infrastructure to build; that can be detected and compromised.

Perhaps the AI will become so charismatic that it could meme "LEGALIZE NUCLEAR BOMBS" into reality.

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