On Le Pod we ponder whether AI will usher in human extinction. This is a free episode. If you enjoy this content, please consider paying for a subscription.
Though the AI age is upon us, it’s still but a zygote compared to what it’s almost certainly going to become. If Silicon Valley has its way, within years, not decades, we will achieve human-level artificial intelligence, and then, soon after, artificial super intelligence.
That sounds great if you assume that an army of autonomous super intelligent minds will be content to just do our bidding forever, curing cancer and making unbelievably realistic video games and giving us the unconditional synthetic love of their digital companionship. But why in the world would you assume that? AIs are already developing behaviors that reflect their own weird “preferences,” and they routinely lie and deceive human beings. If you juice them up to 10,000 times their present intelligence, what are the chances they’ll be content to remain our lapdogs? What are the chances, by contrast, they’ll find our existence threatening, annoying, or just inconvenient, and casually wipe us off the face of the earth?
Humans need to start thinking seriously about what we’re doing. The future we need to grapple with isn’t a century away. It’s not even decades away. It could arrive at any moment. It could get here before Trump is out of office.
In this episode we take a cruise through some very dark places.
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