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There’s no proposed plan for how we could do any such thing and survive. If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers-in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Valid metaphors include “a 10-year-old trying to play chess against Stockfish 15”, “the 11th century trying to fight the 21st century,” and “ Australopithecus trying to fight Homo sapiens“.
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The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss.
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That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.Ībsent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.”
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Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general.
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