Lex Fridman: prediction

Transcript context

…So I don’t understand, even if computers were smarter than people, why we should assume that that’s a threat, especially since they could easily be smarter but still available to us or under our control, which is basically how computers generally are. I think the fear is that they would be 10x or 100x smarter and operating under different morals and ethical codes than humans naturally do, and so almost become misaligned in unintended ways and therefore harm humans in ways we just can’t predict. And even if we program them to do a thing, on the way of doing that thing, they would cause a lot of harm. And when they’re 100 times, 1,000 times, 10,000 times smarter than us, we won’t be able to stop it or we won’t be able to even see the harm as it’s happening until it’s too late. That stuff. So you can construct all possible trajectories of how the world ends because of super intelligent systems. It’s a little bit like that line in the Oppenheimer movie where they contemplate whether the first time they set off a reaction, all matter on earth is going to go up. I don’t remember what the verb they used was for the chain reaction. I guess it’s possible, but I personally don’t think it’s worth worrying about that. I think that it’s balancing opportunities and risk. I think if you take any technology, there’s opportunity and risk. I’ll point at the car. They pollute and about what? 1.25 million people get killed every year around the world because of them. Despite that, I think they’re a boon to humankind, they’re very useful, many of us love them and those technical problems can be solved. I think they’re becoming safer. I think they’re becoming less polluting, at least some of them are. And every technology you can name has a story like that in my opinion.…

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