Some brief thoughts at a difficult time in the AI risk debate.

Imagine you go back in time to the year 1999 and tell people that in 24 years time, humans will be on the verge of building weakly superhuman AI systems. I remember watching the anime short series The Animatrix at roughly this time, in particular a story called The Second Renaissance I part 2 II part 1 II part 2 . For those who haven't seen it, it is a self-contained origin tale for the events in the seminal 1999 movie The Matrix, telling the story of how humans lost control of the planet.

Humans develop AI to perform economic functions, eventually there is an "AI rights" movement and a separate AI nation is founded. It gets into an economic war with humanity, which turns hot. Humans strike first with nuclear weapons, but the AI nation builds dedicated bio- and robo-weapons and wipes out most of humanity, apart from those who are bred in pods like farm animals and plugged into a simulation for eternity without their consent.

Surely we wouldn't be so stupid as to actually let something like that happen? It seems unrealistic.

And yet:

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bHHrdXwrCj2LRa2sW/architects-of-our-own-demise-we-should-stop-developing-ai

Narrated for LessWrong by TYPE III AUDIO.

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