‘AI as an existential threat to humanity’ — a mirage.

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15 min read

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Nov 7

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Why all the stories and forecasts about the threats of ‘unconstrained’ AI? and how we can understand the reality of such mirages.

https://futureoflife.org/ai/the-superintelligence-control-problem/

In my 2018 writing “Robots replacing nurses — not in our lifetime” I reviewed the prevailing views at that time surrounding AI and the existential threat of replacing jobs. This was before all of the recent excitement over so-called ‘large language models’ (LLM) which has only amplified the reverberations of doomsday scenarios.

In this piece I’m going to approach this question from a different perspective. Instead of attempting to explain [again] why the fundamental assumptions of ‘superintelligence’ are flawed, let us discuss the nature of large-scale intellectual mirages.

A significant number of intellectuals have become convinced of a future reality involving a ‘run-away’ AI that threatens humanity.

The nature of large-scale intellectual mirages

History is filled with such delusions, some of which science has been able to correct and many others that remain elusive. There are delusions of the past, present, and delusions of the future, and the future is much more challenging to tease apart because ‘anything can happen!’ Let’s look first at an easy example.

Heliocentricity

An excellent example of a scientifically corrected illusion (or ‘mirage’) is the pre-heliocentric belief that planets and stars orbited the earth.

Capellan system — Valentin Naboth (1573)

The idea of a Sun-centered universe was not prevalent in ancient civilizations. The majority, including the Babylonians, Greeks, and Egyptians, subscribed to a geocentric model, where the Earth was the center of the universe and everything else revolved around it. However, there were early proponents of heliocentrism, such as Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BCE, who proposed that the Earth revolved around the Sun. This idea did not gain traction due to the influential geocentric model of Ptolemy, which became the…