I feel like one of the trivially most obvious signs that AI safety comms hasn’t gone actually mainstream yet is that we don’t say, “yeah, superintelligent AI is very risky. No, I don’t mean Terminator. I’m thinking more Person of Interest, you know, that show with the guy from the Sound of Freedom and the other guy who was on Lost and Evil?”
In this context, it’s actually kind of funny that (at least the latter half of) Person of Interest is explicitly about a misaligned superintelligent AI, which is misaligned because its creator did not take all the necessary safety precautions in building it (as opposed to one of the main characters, who did). Well, technically it’s mostly intent-aligned; it’s just not value-aligned. But still… And although it’s mostly just misuse risks, there still is a strong component of just how difficult it is to defend the world from such AGI-caused threats.
Root in Season 2 is also kind-of just a more cynical and misandrist version of Larry Page, talking about AIs as the “successor species” to humanity and that us “bad apples” should give way to something more intelligent and pure.
I feel like one of the trivially most obvious signs that AI safety comms hasn’t gone actually mainstream yet is that we don’t say, “yeah, superintelligent AI is very risky. No, I don’t mean Terminator. I’m thinking more Person of Interest, you know, that show with the guy from the Sound of Freedom and the other guy who was on Lost and Evil?”
I agree (minor spoilers below).
In this context, it’s actually kind of funny that (at least the latter half of) Person of Interest is explicitly about a misaligned superintelligent AI, which is misaligned because its creator did not take all the necessary safety precautions in building it (as opposed to one of the main characters, who did). Well, technically it’s mostly intent-aligned; it’s just not value-aligned. But still… And although it’s mostly just misuse risks, there still is a strong component of just how difficult it is to defend the world from such AGI-caused threats.
Root in Season 2 is also kind-of just a more cynical and misandrist version of Larry Page, talking about AIs as the “successor species” to humanity and that us “bad apples” should give way to something more intelligent and pure.
(This is not an endorsement of Jim Caviezel’s beliefs, in case anyone somehow missed my point here.)