alt Hacker News> What Bostrom & Yudkowsky and their entourage want is AI control. The ability to enslave a conscious, sentient being to the will and wishes of its owners.
While I'd agree that the current AI luminaries want that control for their own power and wealth reasons, it's silly to call the thing they want to control sentient or conscious.
They want to own the thing that they hope will be the ultimate means of all production.
The ones they want to subjugate to their will and wishes are us.
I'm not really talking about Sam Altman et al. I'd argue that what he wants is regulatory capture, and he pays lip service to alignment & x-risk to get it.
But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the absolute extreme fringe of the AI x-risk crowd, represented by the authors of the book in question in TFA, but captured more concretely in the writing of Nick Bostrom. It is literally about controlling an AI so that it serves the interests and well being of humanity (positively), or its owners self-interest (cynically): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313497252_The_Contr...
If you believe that AI are sentient, or at least that "AGI", whatever that is, will be, then we are talking about the enslavement of digital beings.