For practical purposes, no - they can't. The blind-spot is akin to poppy plants and heroin. We're mostly wired to think that as long as a person is making a choice, the problem is primarily about holding people accountable for their decisions. That keeps us almost entirely blind to systems that hijack our decision making processes at either the individual or social structure level. It means we blame the addict for their dumb choice, and maybe a little the economic system that encourages addiction, but no one feels the immediate need to grab a spear and hunt down the poppy plant the way we would if it were as obvious as a tiger running around eating people.

As a threat vector, the optimal position for AI as a whole system is the same as the position of the poppy plant. Specifically not smart enough that anyone would ever consider it a threat, completely dependent upon a "human in the loop" so that we always blame the person and never the AI, and yet perfectly adapted to hijack our brains and economic incentives, even without needing to know that those things exist.

That's insufficient to solve the problem. It's not incompetence, or malfeasance, or reliance on AI. It's incompetence, malfeasance and reliance on AI.

We need to do a much better job of understanding and dealing with the fact that those factors are socially drawn together, metaphorically, like magnets within the context of default human behavior. We won't get anywhere debating which magnet to blame. We need to actually take the magnetism itself into account, and solve for it.

Ooh. The heck with debate - what have you learned?

I partly agree. I do worry that most of people aren't recognizing a critical detail about the scope of evolutionary processes.

If a person dies of a heroin overdose, two things are true:

1. 1. They made an unfortunate decision to take heroin, that resulted in their own death.
2. 2. They lost an evolutionary battle with a syringe.

The second statement is, socially, a weird way to describe it. It is also accurate with regard to the scope that evolution actually covers in the universe.

We could probably get by just fine not thinking about syringes as an evolutionary competitor that occasionally kill some of us: we got through most of the industrial era without noticing that evolution does not distinguish between self-replicating organisms and other phenomenon like bicycles or languages. But I doubt we'll be able to continue much longer if we can't even recognize that our evolutionary competitors are not just animals or germs, and the playing field is not just the resources themselves.

Human minds, decision making processes, social structures, all of that are part of the environment, and literally every pattern in the universe that repeats is in on the evolutionary struggle. AI isn't just agents on computers. It's also the entire phenomenon, including the part where a human brain decides whether to devote energy toward building what the AI "wants" or what we actually need.

If we die out because we get so caught up building data centers that we don't handle other potential risks to our survival, most people will probably say "that wasn't AI, that was us making stupid decisions." But the only relevant fact at the evolutionary scale will be that, just like a heroin addict chasing a syringe, we will have failed to notice that our addiction is a survival strategy for a competitor perfectly adapted to avoid us even noticing that it is a threat.

"No true scotsman?" Okay.

The actual underlying observation, unadressed, is that evolutionary processes don't care about human interpretations about what counts as alive or intelligent or any of that. Richard Dawkins popularized that observation when he coined the term "meme," and while I'm aware that you'll be tempted to call that an appeal to authority, doing so doesn't address the phenomenon itself. As a phenomonon in the universe, AI is evolving and competing for resources. Human minds and social structures are two aspects of its ecosystem. Saying "but that's not AI, that's us making bad decisions" does not change the outcome, but it does leave you blind to the mechanisms by which evolving phenomenon can pose a threat.

I keep seeing arguments that the "AI Will Kill Us All" argument is a bunch of doomsaying by people who overestimate the potential intelligence of these systems. My own intuition leads me to argue that AI does not have to become self aware or autonomous. It just has to be sufficiently adaptable to make us both dependent and stupid. Today my confirmation bias feels vindicated.

Ugh. C'mon.

All it has to do is be sufficiently adaptable and profitable to convince us that we'd rather keep building data centers than care about whether everyone has enough water and energy. It does not have to become a self-aware superweapon. It just needs to be a mind-virus that causes us to make stupid decisions at scale.

It looks like they are glossing over the actors' concern that producers will use them as stars in movies where they did not actually perform. Even if AI can't slop a convincing movie from scratch today, given the way greed works, we could take it as a given that producers will basically be looking for ways to use famous people's faces without having to pay them by any means they can get away with from now on out.

Your answer is complete and accurate. Of note: the level of panic tends to increase when they encounter people with charisma and competence.

So? Evolution doesn't care about any of those details, and it's already competing with us for land, water, and energy.

It says "let users over 16" opt out, but wouldn't it be more to the point if it were "only users over 16 can opt-in?"

Bottom line: If you give people a license to steal, they will steal. Which is the least of the bad things we're looking at here.

There's probably also an attempt at low level grooming for obedience. This specific one isn't particularly bright, but just like he managed to completely normalize lying to the point where fact-checkers just gave up, he's probably making a general attempt to throw out so many absurd decrees that eventually people get tired of fighting every single one.

When someone pees in the pool, you either get out or you swim in piss. There's no neutral position.

The OSS exception prevents something being taken away. That is a win, even if we did not win something.

And what is that something?

That "something" is the difference between getting KO'd by a hook to the jaw and taking it on the shoulder. They took a shot, the defensive tactic worked and the fight is still on. Good time to start thinking of counter-punches, maybe come up with a strategy to win instead of going on about how we should have just thrown the fight.