I don’t think literal chimp minds could do it, as they probably don’t have enough forethought to predict and avoid bad consequences of their actions. Suppose they could somehow freely propagate through all computer networks and infest everything more complex than a toaster: they could certainly collapse civilization and kill most of us, but would almost certainly kill all of themselves in the process.
At least individually, they won’t be devising ways to run all the processes required to make more hardware to support their existence. There might be some way to combine e-chimp minds into collectives that can make long-term plans and learn how to use technology outside any inbuilt interfaces they might have, but I think it would not be a simple structure, and don’t think they’d be able to find out how to do it themselves. They certainly wouldn’t be able to use our structures, so it would require quite some trial and error without being able to employ many of the more powerful optimization methods that humans can.
I think there is a threshold of intelligence below which an army of AI agents will be very much less effective than human, and it’s probably within the low human range. I can imagine everything at least as complex as a phone suddenly acquiring copies of an emulated homicidal human mind with IQ 60, with more powerful computing devices just running more of them and somewhat faster (up to say 10x speed). I don’t think that would extinguish humanity even if they had some inherent coordination advantages.
I’m not 100% sure that IQ 100 would—it really depends upon how well they can manage to coordinate with each other. If they can do so vastly better than average humans usually coordinate with each other (even when they have common goals), then I’m pretty sure that would suffice. I’m just not sure how much better coordination capability you can get away with and still consider them to be cognitively average human level. Effective coordination is a cognitive task that most groups of humans find very difficult.
Thank you for engaging with the actual question, unlike the other comments! What you seem to be gesturing at is a phase transition from “too dumb to be x-risk dangerous, even is a large group” to “x-risk-level dangerous”. I think this phase transition, or lack thereof would be worth studying, for two reasons:
it is something we CAN study effectively, because we don’t have to reason about intelligences smarter than ourselves.
it is something that can become an x-risk WAY EARLIER than a super-intelligent AGI.
Additionally, there is a fair chance to stave off “dying without dignity” by accidentally unleashing something preventable.
I don’t think literal chimp minds could do it, as they probably don’t have enough forethought to predict and avoid bad consequences of their actions. Suppose they could somehow freely propagate through all computer networks and infest everything more complex than a toaster: they could certainly collapse civilization and kill most of us, but would almost certainly kill all of themselves in the process.
At least individually, they won’t be devising ways to run all the processes required to make more hardware to support their existence. There might be some way to combine e-chimp minds into collectives that can make long-term plans and learn how to use technology outside any inbuilt interfaces they might have, but I think it would not be a simple structure, and don’t think they’d be able to find out how to do it themselves. They certainly wouldn’t be able to use our structures, so it would require quite some trial and error without being able to employ many of the more powerful optimization methods that humans can.
I think there is a threshold of intelligence below which an army of AI agents will be very much less effective than human, and it’s probably within the low human range. I can imagine everything at least as complex as a phone suddenly acquiring copies of an emulated homicidal human mind with IQ 60, with more powerful computing devices just running more of them and somewhat faster (up to say 10x speed). I don’t think that would extinguish humanity even if they had some inherent coordination advantages.
I’m not 100% sure that IQ 100 would—it really depends upon how well they can manage to coordinate with each other. If they can do so vastly better than average humans usually coordinate with each other (even when they have common goals), then I’m pretty sure that would suffice. I’m just not sure how much better coordination capability you can get away with and still consider them to be cognitively average human level. Effective coordination is a cognitive task that most groups of humans find very difficult.
Thank you for engaging with the actual question, unlike the other comments! What you seem to be gesturing at is a phase transition from “too dumb to be x-risk dangerous, even is a large group” to “x-risk-level dangerous”. I think this phase transition, or lack thereof would be worth studying, for two reasons:
it is something we CAN study effectively, because we don’t have to reason about intelligences smarter than ourselves.
it is something that can become an x-risk WAY EARLIER than a super-intelligent AGI.
Additionally, there is a fair chance to stave off “dying without dignity” by accidentally unleashing something preventable.