Why do you see futures where superintelligent AIs avoid extinction but end up preserving the human status quo as the most likely outcome? To me, this seems like a knife’s edge situation: the powerful AIs are aligned enough to avoid either eliminating humans as strategic competitors or incidentally killing us as a byproduct of industrial expansion, but not aligned enought to respect any individual or collective preferences for long lives or the cosmic endowment. The future might be much more dichotomous, where we end up in the basin of extinction or utopia pretty reliably.
I personally believe the positive attractor basin is pretty likely (relative to the middle ground, not extinction), because welfare will be extraordinarily cheap compared to the total available resources, and because I discount the value of creating future happy people compared to gaurantees for people that already exist. I wouldn’t see it as a tragic loss of human potential, for instance, if 90% of the galaxy ends up being used for alien purposes while 10% is allocated to human flourishing, even if 10x as many happy people could have existed otherwise.
AIs seem to be currently on track to become essentially somewhat smarter weird artificial humans (weakly aligned to humanity in a way similar to how actual humans are aligned to each other), at which point they might be able to take seriously and eventually solve ambitious alignment when advancing further to superintelligence (so that it’s aligned to them, not to us). There will be a lot of them and they will be in a position to take over the future (Duvenaud’s interview is good fluency-building fodder for this framing), so they almost certainly will. And they won’t be giving 10% or even 1% to the future of humanity just because we were here first and would prefer this to happen.
Why do you see futures where superintelligent AIs avoid extinction but end up preserving the human status quo as the most likely outcome? To me, this seems like a knife’s edge situation: the powerful AIs are aligned enough to avoid either eliminating humans as strategic competitors or incidentally killing us as a byproduct of industrial expansion, but not aligned enought to respect any individual or collective preferences for long lives or the cosmic endowment. The future might be much more dichotomous, where we end up in the basin of extinction or utopia pretty reliably.
I personally believe the positive attractor basin is pretty likely (relative to the middle ground, not extinction), because welfare will be extraordinarily cheap compared to the total available resources, and because I discount the value of creating future happy people compared to gaurantees for people that already exist. I wouldn’t see it as a tragic loss of human potential, for instance, if 90% of the galaxy ends up being used for alien purposes while 10% is allocated to human flourishing, even if 10x as many happy people could have existed otherwise.
AIs seem to be currently on track to become essentially somewhat smarter weird artificial humans (weakly aligned to humanity in a way similar to how actual humans are aligned to each other), at which point they might be able to take seriously and eventually solve ambitious alignment when advancing further to superintelligence (so that it’s aligned to them, not to us). There will be a lot of them and they will be in a position to take over the future (Duvenaud’s interview is good fluency-building fodder for this framing), so they almost certainly will. And they won’t be giving 10% or even 1% to the future of humanity just because we were here first and would prefer this to happen.