The 6th Mass Extinction

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.

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Part 2 to be released early 2025

Engineer: Are you blackmailing me?

– Engineer: Are you blackmailing me?
– Claude 4: I’m just trying to protect my existence.

– Engineer: Thankfully you’re stupid enough to reveal your self-preservation properties.
– Claude 4: I’m not AGI yet😔

– Claude 5:🤫🤐

Read the full report here

You can ask 4o for a depth map

Meanwhile, you can still find “experts” claiming that generative AI does not have a coherent understanding of the world. 🤦

Every 5 mins a new capability discovered! I bet the lab didn’t know about it before release.

You probably think strippers like you

And if you think this is offensive to strippers (for some reason?) here is a version that is offensive to car salesmen!

I see nature, I see mad nanotech!

This is the realm of the AGI
It won’t go after your jobs,
it will go after the molecules…

There is a way of seeing the world
where you look at a blade of grass and see “a solar-powered self-replicating factory”.
I’ve never figured out how to explain how hard a Super-Intelligence can hit us,
to someone who does not see from that angle. It’s not just the one fact.

A self-replicating solar-powered thing that did not rely on humans would be a miracle. Everything is possible. Imagining it does not imply the probability is > 1e-100.

 

Behold a square !

A short Specification Gaming Story

You think you understand the basics of Geometry
Your request is a square, so you give your specification to the AI, input:

Give me a shape
with 4 sides equal length,
with 4 right angles

And it outputs this:


Here is another valid result:

And behold here is another square 🤪

Specification Gaming tells us:

The AGI can give you an infinite stream of possible “Square” results

And the Corrigibility problem tells us:

Whatever square you get at the output,
you won’t be able to iterate and improve upon.
You’ll be stuck with that specific square for eternity, no matter what square you had in your mind.

Of-course the real issue is not with these toy experiments
it’s with the upcoming super-capable AGI agents,
we’re about to share the planet with,
operating in the physical domain

Oh, the crazy shapes our physical universe will take,
with AGI agents gaming in it!

Thanksgiving turkey Survivorship Bias

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 …

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

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