A suggestive analogy of AI takeover might be the early-modern European colonial takeovers of the New World, India under Pizarro, Cortez, Clives.
Colonialism took several hundred years but the major disempowerement events were quite relatively quick, involving explicit hostile action using superior technology [and many native allies].
Are you imagining AI takeover to be slower or similar to Pizarro/Cortez/Clives campaigns?
A potential counterargument to gradual disempowerement is that one of the decisive advantages that AIs have over humanity & its decisionmaking processing are its speed of thinking and it’s speed and coherency of decision-making (not now but for future agentic systems). Most decisionmaking at a national and international level is slow and mostly concerned with symbolics because of the inherent limitations of decisionmaking at the scale of large human societies [even authoritarian states struggle with good and fast decisionmaking]. AIs could circumvent this and act much faster and decisively.
Another argument is that humans aren’t stupid. The public doesn’t trust AI. When the power of AI is clearly visible it seems likely the public will react given time. Being publicly semi-hostile will incur a response. One shouldn’t fall into the sleepwalker bias. Faking alignment and then suddenly striking seems to be a much more rational move than gradual disempowerment.
A suggestive analogy of AI takeover might be the early-modern European colonial takeovers of the New World, India under Pizarro, Cortez, Clives.
Colonialism took several hundred years but the major disempowerement events were quite relatively quick, involving explicit hostile action using superior technology [and many native allies].
Are you imagining AI takeover to be slower or similar to Pizarro/Cortez/Clives campaigns?
A potential counterargument to gradual disempowerement is that one of the decisive advantages that AIs have over humanity & its decisionmaking processing are its speed of thinking and it’s speed and coherency of decision-making (not now but for future agentic systems). Most decisionmaking at a national and international level is slow and mostly concerned with symbolics because of the inherent limitations of decisionmaking at the scale of large human societies [even authoritarian states struggle with good and fast decisionmaking]. AIs could circumvent this and act much faster and decisively.
Another argument is that humans aren’t stupid. The public doesn’t trust AI. When the power of AI is clearly visible it seems likely the public will react given time. Being publicly semi-hostile will incur a response. One shouldn’t fall into the sleepwalker bias. Faking alignment and then suddenly striking seems to be a much more rational move than gradual disempowerment.