It’s not that it can’t come up with ways to not stamp on us. But why should it? Yes, it might only be a tiny, tiny inconvenience to leave us alone. But why even bother doing that much? It’s very possible that we would be of total insignificance to an AI. Just like the ants that get destroyed at a construction site—no one even noticed them. Still doesn’t turn out too good for them.
Though that’s when there are massive differences of scale. When the differences are smaller, you get into inter-species competition dynamics. Which also is what the OP was pointing at, if I understand correctly.
A superintelligence might just ignore us. It could also e.g. strip mine the whole earth for resources, coz why not? “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else”.
There are many atoms out there and many planets to strip mine and a superintelligence has infinite time. Inter species competition makes sense depending on where you place the intelligence dial. I assume that any intelligence that’s 1,000,000 times more capable than the next one down the ladder will ignore their ‘competitors’ (again, there could be collateral damage but likely not large scale extinction). If you place the dial at lower orders of magnitude then humans are a greater threat to AI, AI reasoning will be closer to human reasoning and we should probably take greater precautions.
To address the first part of your comment: I agree that we’d be largely insignificant and I think it’d be more inconvenient to wipe us out vs just going somewhere else or waiting a million years for us to die off, for example. The closer a superintelligence is to human intelligence the more likely it’ll act like a human (such as deciding to wipe out the competition). The more alien the intelligence the more likely it is to leave us to our own devices. I’ll think more on where the cutoff may be between dangerous AI and largely oblivious AI.
It’s not that it can’t come up with ways to not stamp on us. But why should it? Yes, it might only be a tiny, tiny inconvenience to leave us alone. But why even bother doing that much? It’s very possible that we would be of total insignificance to an AI. Just like the ants that get destroyed at a construction site—no one even noticed them. Still doesn’t turn out too good for them.
Though that’s when there are massive differences of scale. When the differences are smaller, you get into inter-species competition dynamics. Which also is what the OP was pointing at, if I understand correctly.
A superintelligence might just ignore us. It could also e.g. strip mine the whole earth for resources, coz why not? “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else”.
There are many atoms out there and many planets to strip mine and a superintelligence has infinite time. Inter species competition makes sense depending on where you place the intelligence dial. I assume that any intelligence that’s 1,000,000 times more capable than the next one down the ladder will ignore their ‘competitors’ (again, there could be collateral damage but likely not large scale extinction). If you place the dial at lower orders of magnitude then humans are a greater threat to AI, AI reasoning will be closer to human reasoning and we should probably take greater precautions.
To address the first part of your comment: I agree that we’d be largely insignificant and I think it’d be more inconvenient to wipe us out vs just going somewhere else or waiting a million years for us to die off, for example. The closer a superintelligence is to human intelligence the more likely it’ll act like a human (such as deciding to wipe out the competition). The more alien the intelligence the more likely it is to leave us to our own devices. I’ll think more on where the cutoff may be between dangerous AI and largely oblivious AI.