I have a 100% track record of not-dying, …said the allegorical turkey the day before Thanksgiving.
Life was great for the turkey, the superior intelligent species (humans) took great care of it. They provided food and shelter, the turkey felt loved and safe.
Suddenly, one day, the superior intelligent decision makers decided a new fate for the turkey of our story Something that served the instrumental goal of …. Whatever this is …
Suddenly, one day, the superior intelligent decision makers decided a new fate for the turkey of our story Something that served the instrumental goal of …. Whatever this is … https://t.co/tJrWHySP0ipic.twitter.com/WZcZUHPSEH
I imagine turkey risk deniers be like: – the humans have always been great, why would they ever harm me ? And the turkey doomers be like: – well, they might want to wear you for a hat, for a sitcom they shoot they call “friends”, for something they call tv for something they call laughter … anyway it’s complicated
Dear people who think s-risks are unlikely: My challenge to you: watch factory farming footage, then see if you’ve changed your mind. Seriously. Go do it.
The factory farming video below I think will do a good job showing how the vast majority of mammalian life on this planet is experiencing reality. I predict you’ll change your mind.
S-risks can happen. They are happening!!!
We, humans, are a superintelligence compared to all other living beings (so far). And we have created inescapable hell on earth for trillions of them! Even the ones we love we buy and sell, kidnap from their mothers as children, and forcefully sterilize. And this is what we do with our power Because they’re dumber than us! That’s the actual moral reasoning we use. “They’re dumb. They probably don’t experience pain like we do” All day, every day, until they are slaughtered in literal honest to god gas chambers.
Factory farming is a moral crime against God’s creation & a disgusting practice https://t.co/91AMebIOc5
They have absolutely no hope of escape. They are born because we create them, and then we torture them. Because it’s pleasurable to us. “Bacon tastes good” is all of the justification we need.
And AIs are likely to have humans in their values because we’ll put those values into them. Almost any value system we give AIs will include living humans. But if we get the values wrong in some way, we could end up with inescapable hellscapes.
The lifespan of a cow can be more than 25 years. After 5-6 years of repeatedly being impregnated, forced to produce large quantities of milk, dairy cows are left exhausted, unable to keep up with demands, and are sent to the slaughterhouse to be killed for cheap meat. #Milkday 🥛 pic.twitter.com/bnaVe8Ckq8
In fact, you, my dear reader, are superintelligent compared to a cow.
There might be some weird cognitive ability that cows possess that humans are worse at, who knows. But overall, if you count up the ability to understand and control the environment and achieve our goals, humans are, with hardly any exception, smarter than cows.
One of the reasons most sci-fis are unrealistic is that they assume a plucky band of humans can always save the day.
The AIs are never that much smarter than humans.
But that’s not what it’s going to be like.
No matter how plucky the band of cows are, they can never overthrow humans.
So heartbreaking. This #cow knows what's coming for him and he didn't want to go. 😢
My heart breaks for him and every other animal who sees what's coming for them on the kill floors of slaughterhouses. 💔 pic.twitter.com/luJnA8lyHK
We are cows who are about to build humans, and the cow scientists are saying “Don’t worry. We’ll be able to control these beings that are 1000x smarter than us. They’ll just find cows interesting, and we’ll give them cow values.”
We are currently the smartest animals on the planet, and that’s why we’re at the top of the food chain.
It’s not because we’re stronger or faster or have good body awareness.
And we’re about to build something far smarter than us and we don’t know how to control something like that.
We don’t trade with cows We enslave cows They are bought and sold. They are not allowed to leave. Their children are sold to the highest bidder with no consideration to their well-being.
This cow is so scared of being slaughtered that they're actually crying. 💔
RT if you agree that no animal should spend their final moments like this.
The people at the labs put above a 15% chance that once it’s far smarter than us, it will kill all of us.
Now, it could also cure all disease and create a post-scarcity society for all.
But it could also kill us all.
So let’s proceed with caution, goddammit.
Slowly and carefully.
Not “full speed ahead, we gotta do it before the out-group does it, oh no, I’m helpless in the face of market forces” BS.
The AI labs are playing Russian roulette with the whole world, and they can choose to stop.
The governments can choose to protect the public.
You can choose to do your part to get them to not risk your loved ones lives (link in comment for actions you can take)
Instead of sitting back with hopeless apathy, listening to the corporations saying “resistance is futile”, we can fight for Team Humanity, before it’s too late.
What happened the last time a smarter species arrived?
To the animals, we devoured their planet for no reason.
Earth was paperclipped…by us. To them, WE were Paperclip Maximizers.
Our goals were beyond their understanding
Here’s a crazy stat: 96% of mammal biomass became 1) our food, or 2) our slaves. We literally grow them just to eat them, because we’re smarter, and we like how they taste.
We also geoengineered the planet. We cut down forests, poisoned rivers, and polluted the air.
Imagine telling a dumber species that you destroyed their habitat for “money”. They’d say “what the hell is money?”
AGIs may have goals that seem just as stupid to us (“why would an AGI destroy us to make paperclips??”)
“But once AIs are smart enough, they’ll magically become super moral, and they won’t harm us like we harmed the animals”
Maybe! But as humans got smarter, over the last 10,000 years, we didn’t stop expanding – we mostly just colonized more and more of the planet.
Insect populations collapsed 41% this decade alone, yet we don’t care.
Sit with that for a minute. Imagine if nearly half of the people on Earth suddenly died!
That’s what the insects are going through right now, due to us. What if we’re the insects next?
“But some mammals survived!”
Yes, some. Most of them are in cages, waiting to be slaughtered and devoured.
If you were a nonhuman animal, you likely:
1) Went extinct, or 2) Were eaten (e.g. billions of pigs, chickens on factory farms) 3) Became enslaved (e.g. draft animals)
However, a few of the 8 million species got “lucky” and became… pets.
“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” – @ESYudkowsky
“The humans do not hate the other 8 million species, nor do they love them, but their habitats are made out of atoms which humans can use for something else.”
Or as OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever said:
“[After AGI] It’s pretty likely that the entire surface of the Earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers.”
“A good analogy would be the way humans treat animals – when the time comes to build a highway between two cities, we are not asking the animals for permission.”
“I would not underestimate the difficulty of alignment of [AI systems] that are actually smarter than us.”
Sam Altman: “We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants”
“If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it – to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond – they are going to have conflict.”
“We are in the process of seeing a new species grow up around us.” – Mustafa Suleyman, founder of Google DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI
Will the next superintelligent species cause the 7th Mass Extinction? I don’t know, but we are playing with fire.
