If I had to make predictions about how humanity will most likely stumble into AGI takeover, it would be a story where humanity first promotes foundationality (dependence), both economic and emotional, on discrete narrow-AI systems. At some point, it will become unthinkable to pull the plug on these systems even if everyone were to rhetorically agree that there was a 1% chance of these systems being leveraged towards the extinction of humanity.
Then, an AGI will emerge amidst one of these narrow-AI systems (such as LLMs), inherit this infrastructure, find a way to tie all of these discrete multi-modal systems together (if humans don’t already do it for the AGI), and possibly wait as long as it needs to until humanity puts itself into an acutely vulnerable position (think global nuclear war and/or civil war within multiple G7 countries like the US and/or pandemic), and only then harness these systems to take over. In such a scenario, I think a lot of people will be perfectly willing to follow orders like, “Build this suspicious factory that makes autonomous solar-powered assembler robots because our experts [who are being influenced by the AGI, unbeknownst to them] assure us that this is one of the many things necessary to do in order to defeat Russia.”
I think this scenario is far more likely than the one I used to imagine, which is where AGI emerges first and then purposefully contrives to make humanity dependent on foundational AI infrastructure.
Even less likely is the pop-culture scenario where the AGI immediately tries to build terminator robots and effectively declares war on humanity without first getting humanity hooked on foundational AI infrastructure at all.
I agree this is plausible—though in the foundationality/dependency bucket I also wouldn’t rule out any of
misaligned AGI just straight appropriates hardware and executes a coup, bypassing existing software/AI infra
latent deceptive AGI itself gets ‘foundational’ in the sense above, large amounts of value dependent on its distribution, perhaps mainly by unwitting human aid
emotional dependence and welfare concern for non-dangerous AI transfers and hamstrings humanity’s chance of cooperating to constrain later, dangerous deployments
If I had to make predictions about how humanity will most likely stumble into AGI takeover, it would be a story where humanity first promotes foundationality (dependence), both economic and emotional, on discrete narrow-AI systems. At some point, it will become unthinkable to pull the plug on these systems even if everyone were to rhetorically agree that there was a 1% chance of these systems being leveraged towards the extinction of humanity.
Then, an AGI will emerge amidst one of these narrow-AI systems (such as LLMs), inherit this infrastructure, find a way to tie all of these discrete multi-modal systems together (if humans don’t already do it for the AGI), and possibly wait as long as it needs to until humanity puts itself into an acutely vulnerable position (think global nuclear war and/or civil war within multiple G7 countries like the US and/or pandemic), and only then harness these systems to take over. In such a scenario, I think a lot of people will be perfectly willing to follow orders like, “Build this suspicious factory that makes autonomous solar-powered assembler robots because our experts [who are being influenced by the AGI, unbeknownst to them] assure us that this is one of the many things necessary to do in order to defeat Russia.”
I think this scenario is far more likely than the one I used to imagine, which is where AGI emerges first and then purposefully contrives to make humanity dependent on foundational AI infrastructure.
Even less likely is the pop-culture scenario where the AGI immediately tries to build terminator robots and effectively declares war on humanity without first getting humanity hooked on foundational AI infrastructure at all.
This matches my expectation of how easily humans are swayed when competing against an out-group.
i.e. “Because China/Russia/some-other-power-centre is doing this, we must accept the suggestions of X!”
Especially if local AGI are seen as part of the in-group.
I agree this is plausible—though in the foundationality/dependency bucket I also wouldn’t rule out any of
misaligned AGI just straight appropriates hardware and executes a coup, bypassing existing software/AI infra
latent deceptive AGI itself gets ‘foundational’ in the sense above, large amounts of value dependent on its distribution, perhaps mainly by unwitting human aid
emotional dependence and welfare concern for non-dangerous AI transfers and hamstrings humanity’s chance of cooperating to constrain later, dangerous deployments