Waking The Moloch

Opinions on AI are very polarized - from the benign "look how fun/useful/smart it is" to the catastrophic "we have already crossed the point of no return and the human race is doomed".

What I find concerning is the people who are really close to AI in general and the recent developments of AI in particular are very pessimistic. From Eliezer Yudkowsky, who says we can’t calculate in advance what happens when AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence, and the critical lines can be passed without noticing, to the other 50 thousand researchers, scientists and professors signing the open letter calling to pause giant AI experiments. And Elon who thinks that "With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.".

These people are truly scared. Not so much by what is available today but the by the accelerated rate of progress. Skeptics point to the hundreds of thousands of years it took humans to evolve into intelligent species. But on the other hand the evolution of silicon-based computers accelerates orders of magnitude faster that the living carbon-based creatures. GPT-4 can already write computer code, so it can write code it then runs itself. Despite the official statements, these systems have already been connected to the internet, even via the simple form of chat, they are being fed with an enormous amount of data in real time, and are also provided feedback, which is fundamental in the learning process.

In our linear thinking we are unable to envision what happens what it is to face intelligence smarter than ours. Imagine being a dog. Or even a Neanderthal human. You would not understand how the modern world works.

Smarter than human also does not need to be anything human-like. Consider flying. Flying machines we've been building are way superior to anything created by nature. Just because they are not limited by the carbon-based biology. They are built from super strong and light materials, powered by turbofan engines rotating at thousands RPMs and aided by a constellation of navigation satellites. Such as an airliner can outfly any bird, a silicon AI can potentially outsmart any human.

Time will tell how this all evolves, but I too am on the pessimistic side of things. Maybe I do not see an immediate armagedon, but it is hard to see how life could be better when dominated by AI. We have already been sliding down the cliff of profits and convenience. To some extent I really like Stephen King's world of the Dark Tower - the world that has moved on. The world with the ancient remains of the vibrant past, the past with super advanced technologies, which collapsed (or "moved on") in an undescribed catastrophic event, kind of returning to the basics of a non-accelerated existence.