If Anyone Builds it, Everyone dies

I recently finished reading the book "If anyone builds it, everyone dies". The author's make the case for restricting current AI research and deployment of models until we have a better grasp of the technology as a whole. 

They suggest that "...sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in conflict with us — and that if it comes to conflict, an artificial superintelligence would crush us."

We can all read that and shrug our shoulders at the hyperbolic title, but should we? 

Jack Clark, one of the co-founders of Anthropic, recently wrote the following in his newsletter in relation to current AI systems/LLMs:

"But make no mistake: what we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine.

And like all the best fairytales, the creature is of our own creation. Only by acknowledging it as being real and by mastering our own fears do we even have a chance to understand it, make peace with it, and figure out a way to tame it and live together.

And just to raise the stakes, in this game, you are guaranteed to lose if you believe the creature isn’t real. Your only chance of winning is seeing it for what it is.

The central challenge for all of us is characterizing these strange creatures now around us and ensuring that the world sees them as they are – not as people wish them to be, which are not creatures but rather a pile of clothes on a chair."

I think we owe ourselves to look at this technology from two perspectives:

• What it can do for us

• What it can do to us

Right now, the focus is on the former and we scoff at anyone suggesting there is any real danger here (apart from people losing their jobs). But if people within the industry itself are talking about their products as if they were Frankenstein's monster, a real and mysterious creature, maybe we should start taking the latter a bit more serious than we've done so far.

https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/?ref=eyxmay