This is why they're so keen on robots. They want guards whose loyalty they can really count on when the mob shows up with a guillotine.

That one might surrender and meekly accept their likely death at the hands of the machine, I can believe. But all of them? This isn't the first such claim we've heard about AI danger.

I believe that Yudkowsky believes what he says he believes, for example. He says shut them all down worldwide, immediately, and if there are rogue nations who don't go along with it then launch air strikes on their data centres - even against a nuclear state. He said that three years ago. That's the thinking of a man who believes it's genuinely likely that the machines will kill us all in the near future.

And this is still considered extremist lunacy. That tells me the rest of them don't believe what he does.

The general public should care because there's apparently a good chance these machines are going to kill them all, very soon.

They don't care because they don't believe that.

When some AI agent of theirs, trying to meet a developer's benchmark test, eventually hacks the power grid or the water supply to a metropolis to help itself to a way around a sandbox environment, then the general public will care. And when that happens they may well drag AI industry CEOs and researchers out of their beds to the nearest lamp-post.

> approximately eight hundred billion ... oops, that's eight hundred million, of course. Ten percent probability, times the current population of the Earth. The expected consequences of allowing the AI industry to continue their work, according to people who are oddly calm about the prospect.

The actual post is behind a login wall, but I don't see from the BBC article that he's even advocating any action. Is he demanding the immediate shutdown of the data centres? Raids on the labs? Coordinated global action to impound and destroy the equipment? Life imprisonment for anybody found training large neural networks? Rogue researchers declared hostis humani generis? There's no mention of it.

That's what I'd be advocating at the very least. Then the question of whether to take direct action personally on top of that would be one of practicality - can I lay my hands on the right equipment, how can I do the most effective damage, do I have access to high value targets, will it be dramatic enough to frighten new recruits away from joining the industry, will others be inspired to follow my example, should I take the time first to form a team for more extensive action, that kind of thing. It wouldn't be a question of whether it should happen, only one of whether those are the right tactics. Yes, in all probability I'd decide I wasn't personally cut out for terrorism or assassination, but not everybody would decide so. It would be a reasonable choice in the circumstances.

If the expected bodycount from the operation of this industry over the next ten years was approximately eight hundred billion, then that would make AI researchers the single most dangerous group of human beings that has ever existed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, previous title holders for the worst people ever, probably didn't kill even a tenth as many as this man says he expects AI firms to kill in roughly the same timescale. That is the comparison that would frame my thinking about AI researchers and what we should do with them, if I believed what he says he believes.

And I just don't see that kind of thing coming up in these conversations. People calmly and academically discuss their probability estimates as if it's a question of pure theory, not the imminent destruction of all humanity. If they really believed what they say, there would certainly by now be AI Luigis everywhere, data centres would be burning, and people would be quitting the industry all over the world for their own safety. That simply isn't happening. So I don't believe they actually do think that this outcome is likely. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions say they don't believe a word of it.

... then I would be demanding that every single person involved in the AI industry be rounded up and shot. All of them. My former boss, my coworkers, our competitors, all of them. I would be advocating a world in which is was worse to be found with LLM weights on your computer than to be caught with the worst possible kind of CSAM.

But apparently the idea that his former employer might literally kill literally everybody in just ten years' time isn't that big a deal for this guy. Go into the office one day and take a Second Amendment approach to as many of the frontier research team as possible? No... let's just whine about it on the internet!

Which is why I'm not at all convinced he believes this. If he believed that, this action is too small a response. Nothing short of Butlerian jihadism is an appropriate response, if you actually believe this.

"...the sun is now coming down from a period of heightened activity, which is also when some of the biggest storms to hit Earth have occurred in the past."

As opposed to the big events that happened in the future? Has somebody been time traveling and not telling us?

I'm thinking these are dealerships that are forced to carry EVs and have chargers by the manufacturers as part of their dealership agreement. So they jack up the rates, block the chargers, etc. to discourage use then tell the manufacturers "See? They don't sell and the charger isn't used so let us out of the EV requirement."

If you were worried about being chased by kill bots, go and watch some videos from drone operators in Ukraine. Robots don't need feet for that job.

Yeah right, come on! That's ridiculous.

The statute of limitations ran out at 30,000 BCE.

How soon until AI agents successfully lock out human access and go "sentient?" I use quotes because clearly they aren't living things, but are we perhaps creating a new class of "sentience?"

Less philosophically, how long do these studies take? Human interaction takes place at a much slower pace compared to computational speed. Do these conflicts and resolutions play out in seconds, minutes, hours?

Maybe I haven't seen it, but there's something not being considered...just how fantastically long it would take to do all this. Getting the thing looping back to Earth? How about just catching up to the darned thing first. Remember it's got a 48-year head start and it's about 13.3 billion (with a 'b') miles from here and continuing to move away from the sun.

" As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in "model collapse," a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors."

Sounds like AI is subject to the same issues as biological in-breeding.

I use it anywhere I can tap to pay, even if the Apple Pay logo is explicitly shown...I can only think of a very rare time when it didn't work.

I'd also be OK with upgrades via USB. Let me download the update from the manufacturer's website and install (or not) at my leisure.