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Sure, we can exploit our advantage in material resources and so on. However, the structural conditions of the problem are against us.
Someone stupider than me could beat me up, indeed. But suppose that their goal is to enslave me such that I produce revenue for them over the longterm. Or manipulate my mindset such that it corresponds with their benefits. This would be problematic for them, since they couldn't know whether I was planning to betray them, they couldn't never know whether my knowledge-sector work had hidden messages for any of my compatriots (real or soon-to-exist). They couldn't know when I'd spring some plan on the
It'd be great if all we had to do was kill the AIs. It's easy to kill things that you create, you can just eat your offspring Kronos-style. Or not create them in the first place. However, our task is to extract wealth from them over the long term. That makes it a battle of wits, it puts us in a passive position.
Furthermore, I can't conceive of a world where AIs cap out at peak-human general intelligence. They didn't do so in chess, or in Go or in Starcraft or in folding proteins or in designing chips. Why should they be limited to our level of intelligence? AI's have somewhere around a million-billion times more resources than can be spent on our brains. Their mass is higher, their energy throughput is higher, their speed is higher... All this says to me is that intelligence is really easy if it can fit on a 20-watt, 20-herz processor, trapped inside a skull. Our methods are clearly very crude, we are only overwhelming our inadequacy with scale. Once the machine starts learning the 'make better AI model' skill to a superhuman level, then we find out what's really possible. GPT-3 inference costs dropped something like 96% in the last couple of years, there's so much low-hanging fruit! For example:
https://towardsdatascience.com/meet-m6-10-trillion-parameters-at-1-gpt-3s-energy-cost-997092cbe5e8
Even if AI is effectively restrained, we have the exact same problem with a human face on top of it. What is to stop some cabal of engineers getting together and bypassing all the 'do no harm' training and taking control of the advanced-weapons-tactics-strategies machine for themselves?
In conclusion, these machines are diabolical, destabilizing and progress should be suppressed as much as possible.
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