Nate Soares joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what happens when A.I. brain power surpasses what humans are capable of.
If machines become superintelligent we’re toast, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Should we believe them?
And while Yudkowsky and Soares may be unconventional, their warnings are similar to those of Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning “godfather of AI”, and Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most-cited computer scientist, both of whom signed up to the statement that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.
As a clarion call, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is well timed. Superintelligent AI doesn’t exist yet, but in the wake of the ChatGPT revolution, investment in the datacentres that would power it is now counted in the hundreds of billions. This amounts to “the biggest and fastest rollout of a general purpose technology in history,” according to the FT’s John Thornhill. Meta alone will spend as much as $72bn (£54bn) on AI infrastructure this year, and the achievement of superintelligence is now Mark Zuckerberg’s explicit goal.
Not great news, if you believe Yudkowsky and Soares. But why should we? Despite the complexity of its subject, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is as clear as its conclusions are hard to swallow. Where the discussions become more technical, mainly in passages dealing with AI model training and architecture, it’s still straightforward enough for readers to grasp the basic facts. […]
