Use a smart but not self-improving AI agent to antagonize the world with the goal of making advanced societies believe that AGI is a bad idea and precipitating effective government actions. You could call this the Ozymandias approach.
ChaosGPT already exists. It’s incompetent to the point of being comical at the moment, but maybe more powerful analogues will appear and wreak havoc. Considering the current prevalence of malware, it might be more surprising if something like this didn’t happen.
We’ve already seen developments that could have been considered AI “warning shots” in the past. So far, they haven’t been enough to stop capabilities advancement. Why would the next one be any different? We’re already living in a world with literal wars killing people right now, and crazy terrorists with various ideologies. It’s surprising what people get used to. How bad would a warning shot have to be to shock the world into action given that background noise? Or would we be desensitized by then by the smaller warning shots leading up to it? Boiling the frog, so to speak. I honestly don’t know. And by the time a warning shot gets that bad, can we act in time to survive the next one?
Intentionally causing earlier warning shots would be evil, illegal, destructive, and undignified. Even “purely” economic damage at sufficient scale is going to literally kill people. Our best chance is civilization stepping up and coordinating. That means regulations and treaties, and only then the threat of violence to enforce the laws and impose the global consensus on any remaining rogue nations. That looks like the police and the army, not terrorists and hackers.
ChaosGPT already exists. It’s incompetent to the point of being comical at the moment, but maybe more powerful analogues will appear and wreak havoc. Considering the current prevalence of malware, it might be more surprising if something like this didn’t happen.
We’ve already seen developments that could have been considered AI “warning shots” in the past. So far, they haven’t been enough to stop capabilities advancement. Why would the next one be any different? We’re already living in a world with literal wars killing people right now, and crazy terrorists with various ideologies. It’s surprising what people get used to. How bad would a warning shot have to be to shock the world into action given that background noise? Or would we be desensitized by then by the smaller warning shots leading up to it? Boiling the frog, so to speak. I honestly don’t know. And by the time a warning shot gets that bad, can we act in time to survive the next one?
Intentionally causing earlier warning shots would be evil, illegal, destructive, and undignified. Even “purely” economic damage at sufficient scale is going to literally kill people. Our best chance is civilization stepping up and coordinating. That means regulations and treaties, and only then the threat of violence to enforce the laws and impose the global consensus on any remaining rogue nations. That looks like the police and the army, not terrorists and hackers.