One thing I've noticed is that everyone finishes the sentence "the real danger of AI is…" differently.
I model AI as a 10x speed up of the kind of changes we saw in the industrial revolution. Before then, we might be concerned about coffee or alcohol, today we are concerned about designer drugs. Before, cavalry and spies, today tanks and laser microphones and satellites. Before it was evil kings, now they have competition from evil megacorporations.
So sure, Terminator robots… made by the next Jim Jones. Westworld, brought to you by a half-assed startup branding itself as "Uber for Disneyworld" (or, given what happened with their self driving cars, actual Uber). Colossus the Forbin Project, brought to you by the radical outsiders who left Greenpeace. And so on.
But also every other thing, including all things that have already been shown by corporations perusing profits above people, dictatorships in general, and every simple mistake made by a well meaning corporation or democracy or software development team.
At this point, I think it's fairly likely that an AI based on an LLM (being trained on movie scenarios) will attempt to play out the plot of one of them when some bored teenager or misanthrope asks it to.
If we're lucky, it will be incompetent because the script writers have no idea how real life works.
If we are moderately lucky, such an AI will do this in a way that allows one random underdog to push a surprising oversized "stop" button with seconds to spare despite having previously demonstrated overwhelming force against a major nation's entire armed forces.
If we're extremely unlucky, it will be acting out a horror film with great competence.
If I had to bet on one of those three, I'd pick the first option — most scripts are not written by domain experts — but my main expectation outside this is "more of the same stuff we already see with corporations, but faster, and government regulation will continue to be 20 years behind the tech just like it is with the internet in general".
I model AI as a 10x speed up of the kind of changes we saw in the industrial revolution. Before then, we might be concerned about coffee or alcohol, today we are concerned about designer drugs. Before, cavalry and spies, today tanks and laser microphones and satellites. Before it was evil kings, now they have competition from evil megacorporations.
So sure, Terminator robots… made by the next Jim Jones. Westworld, brought to you by a half-assed startup branding itself as "Uber for Disneyworld" (or, given what happened with their self driving cars, actual Uber). Colossus the Forbin Project, brought to you by the radical outsiders who left Greenpeace. And so on.
But also every other thing, including all things that have already been shown by corporations perusing profits above people, dictatorships in general, and every simple mistake made by a well meaning corporation or democracy or software development team.