If we put the emphasis on “simplest possible”, the most minimal that I personally recall writing is this one; here it is in its entirety:
The path we’re heading down is to eventually make AIs that are like a new intelligent species on our planet, and able to do everything that humans can do—understand what’s going on, creatively solve problems, take initiative, get stuff done, make plans, pivot when the plans fail, invent new tools to solve their problems, etc.—but with various advantages over humans like speed and the the ability to copy themselves.
Nobody currently has a great plan to figure out whether such AIs have our best interests at heart. We can ask the AI, but it will probably just say “yes”, and we won’t know if it’s lying.
The path we’re heading down is to eventually wind up with billions or trillions of such AIs, with billions or trillions of robot bodies spread all around the world.
It seems pretty obvious to me that by the time we get to that point—and indeed probably much much earlier—human extinction should be at least on the table as a possibility.
(This is an argument that human extinction is on the table, not that it’s likely.)
This one will be unconvincing to lots of people, because they’ll reject it for any of dozens of different reasons. I think those reasons are all wrong, but you need to start responding to them if you want any chance of bringing a larger share of the audience onto your side. These responses include both sophisticated “insider debates”, and just responding to dumb misconceptions that would pop into someone’s head.
(See §1.6 here for my case-for-doom writeup that I consider “better”, but it’s longer because it includes a list of counterarguments and responses.)
(This is a universal dynamic. For example, the case for evolution-by-natural-selection is simple and airtight, but the responses to every purported disproof of evolution-by-natural-selection would be at least book-length and would need to cover evolutionary theory and math in way more gory technical detail.)
If we put the emphasis on “simplest possible”, the most minimal that I personally recall writing is this one; here it is in its entirety:
(This is an argument that human extinction is on the table, not that it’s likely.)
This one will be unconvincing to lots of people, because they’ll reject it for any of dozens of different reasons. I think those reasons are all wrong, but you need to start responding to them if you want any chance of bringing a larger share of the audience onto your side. These responses include both sophisticated “insider debates”, and just responding to dumb misconceptions that would pop into someone’s head.
(See §1.6 here for my case-for-doom writeup that I consider “better”, but it’s longer because it includes a list of counterarguments and responses.)
(This is a universal dynamic. For example, the case for evolution-by-natural-selection is simple and airtight, but the responses to every purported disproof of evolution-by-natural-selection would be at least book-length and would need to cover evolutionary theory and math in way more gory technical detail.)