After further rereading, I now think that what Drexler imagines is a bit more complex: (section 27.7) “senior human decision makers” would have access to a service with some strategic planning ability (which would have enough power to generate plans with dangerously broad goals), and they would likely restrict access to those high-level services.
I suspect Drexler is deliberately vague about the extent to which the strategic planning services will contain safeguards.
This, of course, depends on the controversial assumption that relatively responsible organizations will develop CAIS well before other entities are able to develop any form of equally powerful AI. I consider that plausible, but it seems to be one of the weakest parts of his analysis.
And presumably the publicly available AI services won’t be sufficiently general and powerful to enable random people to assemble them into an agent AGI? Combining a robocar + Google translate + an aircraft designer + a theorem prover doesn’t sound dangerous. But I’d prefer to have something more convincing than just “I spent a few minutes looking for risks, and didn’t find any”.
After further rereading, I now think that what Drexler imagines is a bit more complex: (section 27.7) “senior human decision makers” would have access to a service with some strategic planning ability (which would have enough power to generate plans with dangerously broad goals), and they would likely restrict access to those high-level services.
I suspect Drexler is deliberately vague about the extent to which the strategic planning services will contain safeguards.
This, of course, depends on the controversial assumption that relatively responsible organizations will develop CAIS well before other entities are able to develop any form of equally powerful AI. I consider that plausible, but it seems to be one of the weakest parts of his analysis.
And presumably the publicly available AI services won’t be sufficiently general and powerful to enable random people to assemble them into an agent AGI? Combining a robocar + Google translate + an aircraft designer + a theorem prover doesn’t sound dangerous. But I’d prefer to have something more convincing than just “I spent a few minutes looking for risks, and didn’t find any”.