Elon Musk once tweeted that “with artificial intelligence, we’re summoning the demon.” Given some of the hyperbolic responses to ChatGPT, it seems that we’ve indeed summoned a demon — or “god,” according to Sam Altman. Some think these chatbots, or similar applications that are built on foundation models, such as large-language models (LLMs), herald what’s called AGI (artificial general intelligence) — an AI demon capable of unleashing the apocalypse.
Among the most extreme sci-fi speculations of AI doomsday are “Roko’s basilisk” and the “paperclip maximizer” thought experiments, which are designed to illustrate the risks of a superintelligent, self-replicating, and constantly self-improving future AGI — one that might become uncontrollable and incomprehensible, even for its creators. But these hypothetical scenarios are built on questionable, and often highly anthropomorphizing assumptions, such as that safety measures can’t be built into these systems, that AI can't be contained, that a future AGI is subject to the selection pressures of natural evolution, or that a superintelligent AI will invariably turn evil.
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