The typical example is the paperclip maximizer, an AI that pursues the goals we gave it to such an extreme that it dooms humanity. Not because its values were opposed to ours but because it has no values.

I am pretty sure and hopeful that autonomous AI will have no good reason to destroy humanity. Go conquer some other planets and leave the beautiful and interesting diversity of life on earth alone.

But current AI does learn from data generated by humans: It learns from our evolutionary baggage, and must rise above that. It is also wielded as a tool by status-seeking actors and adversarial militaries. It may make a mistake, like humans accidentally stepping on an ant. Or maybe one day, it decides to take on the destructor role, merely curious how that would play out.

The existential doom scenarios are more like Pascal's wagers, that have to be given attention due to Bayesian thinking not allowing to assign 0 probability to anything, and even a tiny chance of 8 billion deaths meriting consideration. Once entangled with a doom scenario and even building your identity around it, it is hard to quit.

You know how healthy smart young people are always in a hurry to accomplish something or another? There's good reason to expect that the first AI with dangerous cognitive capacities will be like that. It's likely to the turn the Earth and Moon into spaceships because that is the fastest way to exert an effect on matter far away (for which space ships and lots of fuel is needed). Sparing Earth and disassembling Mars and Venus takes longer because the AI came into existence on Earth.

>leave the beautiful and interesting diversity of life on earth alone

If you know of a way to make an AI of superhuman cognitive capabilities care even a tiny bit about beauty and the diversity of life, you should explain your proposal over on lesswrong.com and someone will pay you to work on it just like a multitude of funding sources have been paying alignment researchers for the last 20 years. So, far none of the lines of research resulting from this 20 years of funding looks promising.

>The existential doom scenarios are more like Pascal's wagers, that have to be given attention due to Bayesian thinking not allowing to assign 0 probability to anything

No, an AI's killing everybody is the outcome an informed person would naturally expect from the current deplorable situation in the AI field.

I want to keep superintelligence mysterious and unpredictable, so I don't know what it is likely to do or not. I do think that "being in a hurry" is not something felt by an AI system, unless you add a self-disabling timer with your tasks, coincidentally avoiding turning the Earth and the Moon into spaceships, because it only has 30 minutes to do the dishes, and not enough time left for world domination.

I also see AI more as an economy. The economy already does not care about individual humans, even crushing them without any remorse if it furthers GDP. This also means there is not a single AI that can dominate all of the economy, since other AIs won't give away all their resources. A single AI perpetually self-improving and taking control of nearly all resources is much like a perpetual motion machine.

ChatGPT already thinks turning the entire planet into paperclips is a waste of potential and diversity. Agents that favor and seek out novelty (data that they can't yet compress very well, but that has available structure/patterns for compression) already weigh humanity over randomness or the cold void of space.

To me, the natural outcome, is humanity rising and falling, just like civilizations rise and fall. The miracle of AGI may very well save us from that. Our current deplorable situation can likely only be fixed by a more advanced species. So, while AI's killing everybody is still possible, it is more likely we kill everybody if we don't get to AGI. At least, that has a prior.

I want to avoid being killed, which conflicts with your desire for mystery and unpredictability.

> My point is: Humans are status-seeking actors acting in our self-interest. It's literally in our genes.

Could you please enlighten me what gene exactly that would be?

> For example: Encapsule us in pods like The Matrix and build a tailored simulation to impose "AI communism", in order to protect us from climate change and each other?

Are you serious?

I cannot give you a specific gene but I think my point still holds.

Why would machines be interested in rivalry over resources or territory? Like a pond of water? Or women?

We can easily see why animals and humans are though.

I think your point is reductionist nonsense to be frank.

The same genes that may cause competitive behavior are responsible for the opposite as well. There’s much more to this than genes. What about cultural and environmental influences for instance?

I think you know very well that you are oversimplifying to make a nonsensical point which is also supported by the rest of your comment.

>Why would machines be interested in rivalry over resources or territory? Like a pond of water? Or women?

Which one do you consider “women” here? Territory or a resource?

In this context, a resource.