As recent experience has shown, exponential processes don’t need to be smarter than us to utterly upend our way of life. They can go from a few problems here and there to swamping all other considerations in a span of time too fast to react to, if preparations aren’t made and those knowledgeable don’t have the leeway to act. We are in the early stages of an exponential increase in the power of AI algorithms over human life, and people who work directly on these problems are sounding the alarm right now. It is plausible that we will soon have processes that can escape the lab just as a virus can, and we as a species are pouring billions into gain-of-function research for these algorithms, with little concomitant funding or attention paid to the safety of such research.
As recent experience has shown, exponential processes don’t need to be smarter than us to utterly upend our way of life. They can go from a few problems here and there to swamping all other considerations in a span of time too fast to react to, if preparations aren’t made and those knowledgeable don’t have the leeway to act. We are in the early stages of an exponential increase in the power of AI algorithms over human life, and people who work directly on these problems are sounding the alarm right now. It is plausible that we will soon have processes that can escape the lab just as a virus can, and we as a species are pouring billions into gain-of-function research for these algorithms, with little concomitant funding or attention paid to the safety of such research.