OK, imagine (for simplicity) that all humans on Earth drop dead simultaneously, but there’s a John-von-Neumann-level AI on a chip connected to a solar panel with two teleoperated robots. Every time they scavenge another chip and solar cell, there becomes another human-level AI copy. Every time a robot builds another teleoperated robot from scavenged parts, there’s that too. What exactly is going to break in “weeks or months”? Solar cells can work for 30 years, no problem. GPUs are also reported to last for decades. (Note that, as long as GPUs are a non-renewable resource, the AI would presumably take extremely good care of them, keeping them dust-free, cooling them well below the nominal temperature spec, etc.) The AI can find decent GPUs in every house on the street, and I think hundreds of millions more by breaking into big data centers. Similar for solar panels. If one robot breaks, another robot can repair it. Janky teleoperated robots without fingers made by students for $20K can vacuum, make coffee, cook a meal, etc. Competent human engineers can make pretty impressive mechanical hands using widely-available parts. I grant that it would take a long while before the growing AI clone army could run a semiconductor supply chain by itself, but it has all the time in the world. I expect it to succeed, and thus to sustain itself into the indefinite future, and I’m confused why you don’t. (Or maybe you do and I’m misunderstanding.)
BTW I also think that a minimal semiconductor supply chain would be very very much simpler than the actual semiconductor supply chain that exists in our human world, which has been relentlessly optimized for cost, not simplicity. For example, EBL (e-beam lithography) has better resolution than EUV and is a zillion times easier to build, but the human economy would never support building out km²-scale warehouses full of millions of EBL machines to compensate for their crappy throughput. But for an AI bootstrapping its way back up, why not?
The key trouble is all the power generators that sustain the AI would break within weeks or months, and the issue is even if they could build GPUs, they’d have no power to run them within at most 2 weeks:
Realistically, we are looking at power grid collapses within days.
And without power, none of the other building projects could work, because they’d stop receiving energy, and importantly this means the AI is on a tight timer, and some of this is partially due to expectations that the first transformative useful AI will use more compute than you project, even conditional on a different paradigm being introduced like brain-like AGIs, but another part of my view is that this is just one of many examples where humans need to constantly maintain stuff in order for the stuff to work, and if we don’t assume tech that can just solve logistics is available within say 1 year, it will take time for AIs to actually survive without humans, and this time is almost certainly closer to months or years than weeks or days.
The hard part of AI takeover isn’t killing all humans, it’s in automating enough of the economy (including developing tech like nanotech) such that the humans stop mattering, and while AIs can do this, it takes actual time, and that time is really valuable in fast moving scenarios.
I’m confused about other parts of your comment as well. Joseph Stalin was able to use his (non-superhuman) intelligence and charisma to wind up in dictatorial control of Russia. What’s your argument that an AI could not similarly wind up with dictatorial control over humans? Don’t the same arguments apply? “If we catch the AI trying to gain power in bad ways, we’ll shut it down.” “If we catch Stalin trying to gain power in bad ways, we’ll throw him in jail.” But the latter didn’t happen. What’s the disanalogy, from your perspective?
I didn’t say AIs can’t take over, and I very critically did not say that AI takeover can’t happen in the long run.
I only said AI takeover isn’t trivial if we don’t assume logistics are solvable.
But to deal with the Stalin example, the answer for how he took over was basically that he was willing to wait a long time, and in particular he used both persuasion and the fact that he already had a significant amount of power by having the General Secretary, and his takeover was basically by allying with loyalists and in particular strategically breaking alliances that he had made, and violence was used later on to show that no one was safe from him.
Which is actually how I expect successful AI takeover to happen in practice, if it does happen.
Very importantly, Stalin didn’t need to create an entire civilization out of nothing, or nearly nothing, and other people like Trotsky handled the logistics, though the takeover situation was far more preferable to the communist party as they both had popular support and didn’t have as long supply lines as the opposition forces like the Whites did, and they had a preexisting base of industry that was much easier to seize than modern industries.
This applies to most coups/transitions of power in that most of the successful coups aren’t battles between factions, but rather one group managing to make itself the new Schelling point over other groups.
Most of my commentary in the last comment is either arguing that things can be made more continuous and slow than your story depicts, or arguing that your references don’t support what you claimed, and I did say that the cyberattack story is plausible, just that it didn’t support the idea that AIs could entirely replace civilization without automating away us first, which takes time.
This doesn’t show AI doom can’t happen, but it does matter for the probability estimates of many LWers on here, because it’s a hidden background assumption disagreement that underlies a lot of other disagreements.
OK, imagine (for simplicity) that all humans on Earth drop dead simultaneously, but there’s a John-von-Neumann-level AI on a chip connected to a solar panel with two teleoperated robots. Every time they scavenge another chip and solar cell, there becomes another human-level AI copy. Every time a robot builds another teleoperated robot from scavenged parts, there’s that too. What exactly is going to break in “weeks or months”?
Then your response included:
The key trouble is all the power generators that sustain the AI would break within weeks or months, and the issue is even if they could build GPUs, they’d have no power to run them within at most 2 weeks…
I included solar panels in my story precisely so that there would be no need for an electric grid. Right?
I grant that powering a chip off a solar panel is not completely trivial. For example, where I live, residential solar cells are wired in such a way that they shut down when the grid goes down (ironically). But, while it’s not completely trivial to power a chip off a solar cell, it’s also not that hard. I believe that a skilled and resourceful human electrical engineer would be able to jury-rig a solution to that problem without much difficulty, using widely-available parts, like the electronics already attached to the solar panel, plus car batteries, wires, etc. Therefore our hypothetical “John-von-Neumann-level AI with a teleoperated robot” should be able to solve that problem too. Right?
(Or were you responding to something else? I’m not saying “all humans on Earth drop dead simultaneously” is necessarily realistic, I’m just trying to narrow down where we disagree.)
I did not realize you were assuming that the AI was powered solely by solar power that isn’t connected to the grid.
Given your assumption, I agree that AGI can rebuild supply chains from scratch, albeit paiinfully and slowly, so I agree that AGI is an existential threat assuming it isn’t aligned.
I was addressing a different scenario because I didn’t read the part of your comment where you said the AI is independent of the grid.
The key trouble is all the power generators that sustain the AI would break within weeks or months, and the issue is even if they could build GPUs, they’d have no power to run them within at most 2 weeks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZombieSurvivalTactics/comments/s6augo/comment/ht4iqej/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/klupbw/comment/ghb0fer/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Realistically, we are looking at power grid collapses within days.
And without power, none of the other building projects could work, because they’d stop receiving energy, and importantly this means the AI is on a tight timer, and some of this is partially due to expectations that the first transformative useful AI will use more compute than you project, even conditional on a different paradigm being introduced like brain-like AGIs, but another part of my view is that this is just one of many examples where humans need to constantly maintain stuff in order for the stuff to work, and if we don’t assume tech that can just solve logistics is available within say 1 year, it will take time for AIs to actually survive without humans, and this time is almost certainly closer to months or years than weeks or days.
The hard part of AI takeover isn’t killing all humans, it’s in automating enough of the economy (including developing tech like nanotech) such that the humans stop mattering, and while AIs can do this, it takes actual time, and that time is really valuable in fast moving scenarios.
I didn’t say AIs can’t take over, and I very critically did not say that AI takeover can’t happen in the long run.
I only said AI takeover isn’t trivial if we don’t assume logistics are solvable.
But to deal with the Stalin example, the answer for how he took over was basically that he was willing to wait a long time, and in particular he used both persuasion and the fact that he already had a significant amount of power by having the General Secretary, and his takeover was basically by allying with loyalists and in particular strategically breaking alliances that he had made, and violence was used later on to show that no one was safe from him.
Which is actually how I expect successful AI takeover to happen in practice, if it does happen.
Very importantly, Stalin didn’t need to create an entire civilization out of nothing, or nearly nothing, and other people like Trotsky handled the logistics, though the takeover situation was far more preferable to the communist party as they both had popular support and didn’t have as long supply lines as the opposition forces like the Whites did, and they had a preexisting base of industry that was much easier to seize than modern industries.
This applies to most coups/transitions of power in that most of the successful coups aren’t battles between factions, but rather one group managing to make itself the new Schelling point over other groups.
@Richard_Ngo explains more below:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d4armqGcbPywR3Ptc/power-lies-trembling-a-three-book-review#The_revolutionary_s_handbook
Most of my commentary in the last comment is either arguing that things can be made more continuous and slow than your story depicts, or arguing that your references don’t support what you claimed, and I did say that the cyberattack story is plausible, just that it didn’t support the idea that AIs could entirely replace civilization without automating away us first, which takes time.
This doesn’t show AI doom can’t happen, but it does matter for the probability estimates of many LWers on here, because it’s a hidden background assumption disagreement that underlies a lot of other disagreements.
I wrote:
Then your response included:
I included solar panels in my story precisely so that there would be no need for an electric grid. Right?
I grant that powering a chip off a solar panel is not completely trivial. For example, where I live, residential solar cells are wired in such a way that they shut down when the grid goes down (ironically). But, while it’s not completely trivial to power a chip off a solar cell, it’s also not that hard. I believe that a skilled and resourceful human electrical engineer would be able to jury-rig a solution to that problem without much difficulty, using widely-available parts, like the electronics already attached to the solar panel, plus car batteries, wires, etc. Therefore our hypothetical “John-von-Neumann-level AI with a teleoperated robot” should be able to solve that problem too. Right?
(Or were you responding to something else? I’m not saying “all humans on Earth drop dead simultaneously” is necessarily realistic, I’m just trying to narrow down where we disagree.)
I did not realize you were assuming that the AI was powered solely by solar power that isn’t connected to the grid.
Given your assumption, I agree that AGI can rebuild supply chains from scratch, albeit paiinfully and slowly, so I agree that AGI is an existential threat assuming it isn’t aligned.
I was addressing a different scenario because I didn’t read the part of your comment where you said the AI is independent of the grid.