The cow saga

You are much smarter than a cow.

(I know, I say the most flattering things)

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.

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.

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.

Categories

Latest Posts Feed

Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.  There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could.  Also, most of these other big threats are already widely feared.

It is extremely hard to put a timeframe on when this will happen (more on this later), and it certainly feels to most people working in the field that it’s still many, many years away.  But it’s also extremely hard to believe that it isn’t very likely that it will happen at some point.

SMI does not have to be the inherently evil sci-fi version to kill us all.  A more probable scenario is that it simply doesn’t care about us much either way, but in an effort to accomplish some other goal (most goals, if you think about them long enough, could make use of resources currently being used by humans) wipes us out.  Certain goals, like self-preservation, could clearly benefit from no humans.  We wash our hands not because we actively wish ill towards the bacteria and viruses on them, but because we don’t want them to get in the way of our plans.
[…]
Evolution will continue forward, and if humans are no longer the most-fit species, we may go away.  In some sense, this is the system working as designed.  But as a human programmed to survive and reproduce, I feel we should fight it.

How can we survive the development of SMI?  It may not be possible.  One of my top 4 favorite explanations for the Fermi paradox is that biological intelligence always eventually creates machine intelligence, which wipes out biological life and then for some reason decides to makes itself undetectable.

It’s very hard to know how close we are to machine intelligence surpassing human intelligence.  Progression of machine intelligence is a double exponential function; human-written programs and computing power are getting better at an exponential rate, and self-learning/self-improving software will improve itself at an exponential rate.  Development progress may look relatively slow and then all of a sudden go vertical—things could get out of control very quickly (it also may be more gradual and we may barely perceive it happening).
[…]
it’s very possible that creativity and what we think of us as human intelligence are just an emergent property of a small number of algorithms operating with a lot of compute power (In fact, many respected neocortex researchers believe there is effectively one algorithm for all intelligence.  I distinctly remember my undergrad advisor saying the reason he was excited about machine intelligence again was that brain research made it seem possible there was only one algorithm computer scientists had to figure out.)

Because we don’t understand how human intelligence works in any meaningful way, it’s difficult to make strong statements about how close or far away from emulating it we really are.  We could be completely off track, or we could be one algorithm away.

Human brains don’t look all that different from chimp brains, and yet somehow produce wildly different capabilities.  We decry current machine intelligence as cheap tricks, but perhaps our own intelligence is just the emergent combination of a bunch of cheap tricks.

Many people seem to believe that SMI would be very dangerous if it were developed, but think that it’s either never going to happen or definitely very far off.   This is sloppy, dangerous thinking.”

Even the best utopian scenario of a fully automated “solved world” is actually dystopian AF !!!

I want you to picture this:
You wake up tomorrow in your bed that adjusts to your perfect sleep cycle. Your coffee brewed exactly how you like it. Your news curated for your bubble, your entertainment selected for your mood and your feel… NOTHIN! Cuz somewhere in the night while you were sleeping, the world learned to run without you.

Your job… AUTOMATED! your creativity… REPLICATED! your expertise… DOWNLOADED! Your perspective… SIMULATED! your passion projects… GENERATED IN SECONDS!

You sit there in your perfect automated morning with your perfect, personalised everything and you realise:

NOBODY CALLED! NOBODY TEXTED! NOBODY NEEDS YOU TO SOLVE ANYTHING! NOBODY NEEDS YOU.  NOBODY NEEDS YOU TO CREATE ANYTHING! NOBODY NEEDS YOU TO SHOW UP! NOBODY NEEDS. NOBODY NEEDS YOU.

And that feeling you’ve been pushing down,

that dread creeping up your spine, that voice you’ve been silencing, finally speaks…

“Will I matter anymore?”

Do I… matter anymore?

AI Safety Advocates

Watch videos of experts eloquently explaining AI Risk

Industry Leaders and Notables

Videos of famous public figures openly warning about AI Risk

Original Films

Lethal Intelligence Guide and Short Stories

Channels

Creators contributing to raising AI risk awareness

Stay In The Know!

Your email will not be shared with anyone and won’t be used for any reason besides notifying you when we have important updates or new content

Popular Authors

×