Do you remember the end of Watchmen?
To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.
Have you take a look at the mortality trends?
https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/
As Pfizer scientists raced to develop their COVID-19 vaccine at record-breaking speed these past few months, they turned to an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help achieve this mission.
“Do it?” Dan, I’m not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I “did it” 35 minutes ago.
I think that, despite mentioning Larry David, you didn’t consider the most useful technique when it comes to steer a conversation, which is to be an asshole while using a hefty dose of humor.
In my experience, if you try to have a meta-conversation, no matter how delicately you put it, you are, in my experience at least, going to ruin the situation and make people uncomfortable. But if you are funny and shameless enough, you can get away with murder, you can be as blunt as you want to be and people is going to to laugh it off while still giving you points for being able to correct the situation.
When it comes to social dynamics, my experience tells me that power triumphs delicacy and decency. The times I have been myself in a situation in which someone did 80% of the talk I just said out loud something like:
‘Hey! Come on! Why don’t you shut the fuck up already? You are driving me crazy, I don’t even remember the sound of my own voice anymore. It was masculine? I thought that it was masculine. And deep. Heavenly even. It is not? Not a little bit heavenly? You ruined me. That’s what you did with that much talking. I’m now a listener!’.
The other person may fight back or may feel bad. In the first case, you can banter a little; in the second, you just say: ‘oh, don’t take it so seriously, I really like you, you know that, I just want to hear what other people has to say and I’m a little bit of an asshole, everyone knows. We can still be best friends, right? What are your thoughts on betrayal, bestie?’.
I have cultivated an image of someone who always says what he wants and who can take many jabs without feeling insulted. So people let me say anything and laugh at it while still listening to what I say.
I have found out that the most intelligent thing in social situations, no matter how smart the other people are, is to pretend that you are rude and stupid when necessary, almost feral. I have found out that the only thing that makes you lose prestige in a social situation is to appear as someone weak that can be stepped on.
I believe that for highly educated, highly intelligent, sensible people this is hard to accept. But it is my experience. Confidence and bluntness beats carefulness and thoughtfulness every time. And rationality is about wining, isn’t it? To win, you sometimes need to act as an idiot and an asshole.
Even if you don’t have a sense of hierarchy, I can assure you that other people have it.