Navigating the Risks of Superintelligent AI

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The chapter delves into the implications and risks of superintelligent AI surpassing human capabilities, emphasizing the need for responsible constraints and a potential pause in AI development. It challenges the notion of a singular intelligence and discusses the dangers associated with advanced reasoning abilities and destabilizing technological breakthroughs. The conversation also touches on public perception, policy measures, and concerns about predicting AI capabilities, highlighting the complexities of managing the risks posed by AI innovation.

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Should we pause AI development? What might it mean for an AI system to be "provably" safe? Are our current AI systems provably unsafe? What makes AI especially dangerous relative to other modern technologies? Or are the risks from AI overblown? What are the arguments in favor of not pausing — or perhaps even accelerating — AI progress? What is the public perception of AI risks? What steps have governments taken to migitate AI risks? If thoughtful, prudent, cautious actors pause their AI development, won't bad actors still keep going? To what extent are people emotionally invested in this topic? What should we think of AI researchers who agree that AI poses very great risks and yet continue to work on building and improving AI technologies? Should we attempt to centralize AI development?

Joep Meindertsma is a database engineer and tech entrepreneur from the Netherlands. He co-founded the open source e-democracy platform Argu, which aimed to get people involved in decision-making. Currently, he is the CEO of Ontola.io, a software development firm from the Netherlands that aims to give people more control over their data; and he is also working on a specification and implementation for modeling and exchanging data called Atomic Data. In 2023, after spending several years reading about AI safety and deciding to dedicate most of his time towards preventing AI catastrophe, he founded PauseAI and began actively lobbying for slowing down AI development. He's now trying to grow PauseAI and get more people in action. Learn more about him on his GitHub page.

Staff