Carl Shulman: prediction

Transcript context

…For listeners who are skeptical of something like this. Ken Thompson, one of two developers of UNIX, showed people when he was getting the Turing award that he had given himself root access to all UNIX machines. He had manipulated the assembly of UNIX such that he had a unique login for all UNIX machines. I don't want to give too many more details because I don’t remember the exact details but UNIX is the operating system that is on all the servers and all your phones. It's everywhere and the guy who made it, a human being, was able to write assemblies such that it gave him root access. This is not as implausible as it might seem to you. And the major intelligence agencies have large stocks of zero-day exploits and we sometimes see them using them. Making systems that reliably don't have them when you're having very, very sophisticated attempts to spoof and corrupt this would be a way you could lose. If there's no premature AI action, we're building the tools and mechanisms and infrastructure for the takeover to be just immediate because effective industry has to be under AI control and robotics. These other mechanisms are for things happening even earlier than that, for example, because AIs compete against one another in when the takeover will happen. Some would like to do it earlier rather than be replaced by say further generations of AI or there's some other disadvantage of waiting. Maybe if there's some chance of being uncovered during the delay we were talking when more infrastructure is built. These are mechanisms other than — just remain secret while all the infrastructure is built with human assistance. By the way, how would they be coordinating?…

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