alt Hacker NewsIsn't that what they're doing? "There's a better than 0 chance this thing could kill everyone in the next decade."
That might be too imprecise for the HN set but it's realistic for laypeople.
And none of the AI people talking about the risk are running into rooms full of people telling them Claude has gone mad and yelling at them to disconnect from the internet and turn off their devices immediately.
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> That might be too imprecise for the HN set but it's realistic for laypeople.
Some 'laypeople' will be scared for a while and then return to more pressing issues and exactly nothing good will come out of that. If there really are some issues worth discussing the first step the AI doom crowd should do is to stop the PR offensive and concentrate on producing verifiable claims and actionable small steps. Otherwise their effort will fail this time and when/if a next time comes, they will have a lot less PR capital to burn.
A key facet of the suggested risk is that these programs would attempt to mask whatever behavior would bring about the end of the world. A world in which AI doom could be detected before it’s too late and stopped by metaphorically running into rooms full of people telling people to unplug is less extreme than that in which doomers argue we are already living.
Alarm takes severity and scale. Forecasting double-digit odds of near-term human extinction on national television to a lay audience is more extreme than yelling to unplug rogue AI. For what it’s worth, the latter has already occurred numerous times at containable scales in leading labs, mitigated by the physical realities of computation, notwithstanding the competence of involved personnel. People running into rooms yelling is probably not a hypothetical.