AI already can do thousands or even millions of tasks per second. If we invent a way for an AI to have thoughts as complicated or nuanced as a human, and plug it into an existing AI, it might be able to have a thousand or a million thoughs per second. That’s a very dangerous thing.
Techxecutives and policymakers.
note that most biologists know that the “daily currency of other species” is not claws, teeth, or armor; it is a strong sense of smell or an immune system that can handle specific germs in specific environments e.g. vulture stomachs.
this is significant because policymakers might hire biologist consultants in order to test a report to see if its claims are accurate
“Humanity has risen to a position where we control the rest of the world precisely because of our [unrivaled] mental abilities. If we pass this mantle to our machines, it will be they who are in this unique position.”
Toby Ord, The Precipice
Replaced [unparalleled] with [unrivaled]
“Human minds represent a tiny dot in the vast space of all possible mind designs, and very different kinds of minds are unlikely to share to complex motivations unique to humans and other mammals.”
https://intelligence.org/ie-faq/
ML researchers
We need to solve the problem of erratic behavior in AI, before erratic behavior emerges in an AI smart enough to identify and compromise human controllers.
Policymakers and techxecutives, not ML researchers
With the emergence of Covid variants and social media, global quality of life/living conditions will improve and decline. It will ebb and flow, like the tide, and generally be impossible to prevent.
But if AI becomes as smart to humans as humans are to ants, that won’t matter anymore. It will be effortless and cheap to automatically generate new ideas or new inventions, and give people whatever they want or need. But if the AI malfunctions instead, it would be like a tidal wave.
Policymakers and techxecutives:
If we build an AI that’s smarter than a human, then it will be smarter than a human, so it won’t have a hard time convincing us that it’s on our side. This is why we have to build it perfectly, before it’s built, not after.
“There’s been centuries of precedent of scientists incorrectly claiming that something is impossible for humans to invent”
“right before the instant something is invented successfully, 100% of the evidence leading up to that point will be evidence of failed efforts to invent it. Everyone involved will only have memories of people failing to invent it. Because it hasn’t been invented yet”
the first sentence counts as a one-liner
For policymakers:
The predictability of today’s AI systems doesn’t tell us squat about whether they will remain predictable after achieving human-level intelligence. Individual apes are far more predictable than individual humans, and apes themselves are far less predictable than ants.
Techxecutives and policymakers:
We have no idea when it will be invented. All we know is that it won’t be tomorrow. But when we do discover that it’s going to be tomorrow, it will already be too late to make it safe and predictable.
It is inevitable that humanity will one day build an AI that is smarter than a human. Engineers have been succeeding at that for decades now. But we instinctively think that such a day is centuries away, and that kind of thinking has always failed to predict every milestone that AI has crossed over the last 10 years.
“Human intelligence did not evolve in order to conquer the planet or explore the solar system. It emerged randomly, out of nowhere, as a byproduct of something much less significant.”
Alternative:
Human intelligence did not evolve in order to conquer the planet or explore the solar system. It emerged randomly, out of nowhere, and without a single engineer trying to create it. And now we have armies of those engineers”
Refined for policymakers and techxecutives:
“A machine with superintelligence would be able to hack into vulnerable networks via the internet, commandeer those resources for additional computing power, … perform scientific experiments to understand the world better than humans can, … manipulate the social world better than we can, and do whatever it can to give itself more power to achieve its goals — all at a speed much faster than humans can respond to.”
“A machine with superintelligence would be able to hack into vulnerable networks via the internet, commandeer those resources for additional computing power, take over mobile machines connected to networks connected to the internet, use them to build additional machines, perform scientific experiments to understand the world better than humans can, invent quantum computing and nanotechnology, manipulate the social world better than we can, and do whatever it can to give itself more power to achieve its goals — all at a speed much faster than humans can respond to.”
“One might say that “Intelligence is no match for a gun, or for someone with lots of money,” but both guns and money were produced by intelligence. If not for our intelligence, humans would still be foraging the savannah for food.”
“Machines are already smarter than humans are at many specific tasks: performing calculations, playing chess, searching large databanks, detecting underwater mines, and more. But one thing that makes humans special is their general intelligence. Humans can intelligently adapt to radically new problems in the urban jungle or outer space for which evolution could not have prepared them.”
“The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position”
Bostrom, superintelligence, 2014
For policymakers
Optional extra (for all 3):
“Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move.”
I tried to shrink the first image but it still displays it at the obnoxiously large full size
I’m down with this; if I had 24 hours I could either delete or dramatically increase the quality of around 30 of my entries (60 if you count shortening and refining the yudkowsky quotes). I bet a bunch of other people could keep the momentum of the last 24 hours going, in addition to Sue and I who know we can turn the extra time into really good entries.
It would also give OP a reason to put this contest back on the front page (where it belongs), and it wouldn’t create a bad precedent because it shouldn’t cause any additional people to miss deadlines for contests in the future.
I have some other things I could work on tomorrow, but I’d rather spend it refining my entries if I’m certain that the contest isn’t closed.