But you see why ‘sure, loads of existing animal species have and will go extinct due to humans, but that’s ok from the god’s eye POV because there’s lots of new species being created or some other species can increase its numbers to occupy the now-vacant niches’ is not comforting when we are discussing the prospects of an existing species (us) if we begin to be treated the way that we treat animals is not an argument for safety, right? It is an argument for danger: you can’t even make the argument “at least it has some incentive to keep humans around to fill the niche” when that didn’t save all the previous species who went extinct, because their niche was simply filled by an existing or new species. It does us no good if a successor AI civilization maintains the total amount of biomass roughly as it is but the winning species is cockroaches or dogs or chimpanzees or something (or some humans survive in a bunker somewhere, barely hanging on), which is the Outside View of what humans have done to other species thus far: wiped out large swathes, often quite arbitrarily (sometimes based literally on fashion trends), and replaced them, if at all, with some other species. If that happened again, as it has happened so many times so far, that still represents a near-total zeroing out of the value of the future for humans. And humans are what I care about, not hypothetical neo-cockroaches optimally adapted for living off datacenter heat vents.
The question to me is just why the human species would be the one that goes extinct. It could happen, accidentally or intentionally. But why? Are we going to be competing in some niche with the new AI species? I don’t quite see that. Would they change the environment in some way that is incompatible with humans, intentionally or just that’s their pollution? Yes, maybe. Would the possible crowd us out of your habitat? That seems rather unlikely for two reasons. Humans can survive in a lot of different areas and have largely learned to modify their environment pretty well (clothes, shelter, heating, cooling, farming, ranching, material sciences). Second, as humans have become more informed (I won’t say more intelligent) and knowledgeable it seems we start taking actions to prevent the harms we’re doing. It’s not quite fair to only point to the bad cases of human other species relationships and ignore the positive ones.
The AI doing this to us, if it’s smarter and better informed than humans might be expected to behave similarly. That does shift the issue to some extent to what type of morality and recognition value of life AIs might have. Maybe people have already thought through that issue and have a high confidence level that AI will be very amoral and uninterested in life as a value in and of itself. If that is not the case, and we can expect AIs to show some level of morality and respect for other life then one might expect that as various type of ties emerge and relationships form more consideration would be granted.
A last note for consideration. I am not able to get a quick confirmation but my impression is that a fair amount of the species extinction is not really equivalent to all humans going extinct due to some AI. I’ll use polar bears as the example. Global warming may well drive polar bears on to land and ultimately result in none remaining. But they are fully able to breed with other bears in one sense they will not completely gone extinct (a bit like neanderthals sill have DNA walking the world in living people). The equivalent case here would be AI resulting in all white, blue-eyed people dying off. That’s not human extinction as you’re talking about. I would like to find some data that might prove a possible case but suspect that would be a major research project in its own right. I wonder if the cases where humans have actually produced an extinction equivalent to human extinction might also be cases where the number of related species was already heavily taxed by natural selective pressures and already on the way out and human impact was a last straw—so more about timing than anything.
This article in Forbes also point towards additional complications related to thinking about species extinction, as well as new species discovery.
But you see why ‘sure, loads of existing animal species have and will go extinct due to humans, but that’s ok from the god’s eye POV because there’s lots of new species being created or some other species can increase its numbers to occupy the now-vacant niches’ is not comforting when we are discussing the prospects of an existing species (us) if we begin to be treated the way that we treat animals is not an argument for safety, right? It is an argument for danger: you can’t even make the argument “at least it has some incentive to keep humans around to fill the niche” when that didn’t save all the previous species who went extinct, because their niche was simply filled by an existing or new species. It does us no good if a successor AI civilization maintains the total amount of biomass roughly as it is but the winning species is cockroaches or dogs or chimpanzees or something (or some humans survive in a bunker somewhere, barely hanging on), which is the Outside View of what humans have done to other species thus far: wiped out large swathes, often quite arbitrarily (sometimes based literally on fashion trends), and replaced them, if at all, with some other species. If that happened again, as it has happened so many times so far, that still represents a near-total zeroing out of the value of the future for humans. And humans are what I care about, not hypothetical neo-cockroaches optimally adapted for living off datacenter heat vents.
The question to me is just why the human species would be the one that goes extinct. It could happen, accidentally or intentionally. But why? Are we going to be competing in some niche with the new AI species? I don’t quite see that. Would they change the environment in some way that is incompatible with humans, intentionally or just that’s their pollution? Yes, maybe. Would the possible crowd us out of your habitat? That seems rather unlikely for two reasons. Humans can survive in a lot of different areas and have largely learned to modify their environment pretty well (clothes, shelter, heating, cooling, farming, ranching, material sciences). Second, as humans have become more informed (I won’t say more intelligent) and knowledgeable it seems we start taking actions to prevent the harms we’re doing. It’s not quite fair to only point to the bad cases of human other species relationships and ignore the positive ones.
The AI doing this to us, if it’s smarter and better informed than humans might be expected to behave similarly. That does shift the issue to some extent to what type of morality and recognition value of life AIs might have. Maybe people have already thought through that issue and have a high confidence level that AI will be very amoral and uninterested in life as a value in and of itself. If that is not the case, and we can expect AIs to show some level of morality and respect for other life then one might expect that as various type of ties emerge and relationships form more consideration would be granted.
A last note for consideration. I am not able to get a quick confirmation but my impression is that a fair amount of the species extinction is not really equivalent to all humans going extinct due to some AI. I’ll use polar bears as the example. Global warming may well drive polar bears on to land and ultimately result in none remaining. But they are fully able to breed with other bears in one sense they will not completely gone extinct (a bit like neanderthals sill have DNA walking the world in living people). The equivalent case here would be AI resulting in all white, blue-eyed people dying off. That’s not human extinction as you’re talking about. I would like to find some data that might prove a possible case but suspect that would be a major research project in its own right. I wonder if the cases where humans have actually produced an extinction equivalent to human extinction might also be cases where the number of related species was already heavily taxed by natural selective pressures and already on the way out and human impact was a last straw—so more about timing than anything.
This article in Forbes also point towards additional complications related to thinking about species extinction, as well as new species discovery.