The real question is: Why do all controls fail vs an AI (other than by invoking magic)?

You send new commands through whatever communication link it is using.

Why would someone not throw a switch when their child is in hospital?

Because they care more about their child than flipping the switch? The doctor says you have to come and give a blood transfusions or your child will be dead in half an hour because of some made up disease? Be a bit creative.

Why is there no back-up for that person?

Run over by a self driving car hacked by the evil AI.

Why do all controls fail vs an AI?

Nobody says that they necessarily all fail, the point is that »I will just turn it off.« might not cut it.

On the child issue: that is just not how people are trained for those jobs and how they react.

Switching it off might or might not be enought, but above all that super AGI needs to exists first anyway.

We connected ChatGPT to the internet because as far as we could tell it seemed harmless. What we missed is that it secretly is an evil AI, it identified a group of terrorists and is discussing with them since months how to execute a devastating attack. It provided them with a brilliant startup idea and now millions of investor money are flowing in. Now that they have the financial resources, they are discussing how to use them most effectively.

We know from countless experiments that AIs can behave in unexpected ways. We know how indifferent we humans can be to other life. We are pretty careful when we approach unknown lifeforms, whether microbes in the lab or animals in the dschungel. We would probably be pretty careful towards aliens. We have also not been careful with new thing, for example when we discovered radioactivity, and it certainly caused harm. I do not see from where we should get justification for an attitude towards AI that there are no risks worth considering.

An advanced AI could be more like tinkering with deadly viruses, if one accidentally escapes your bio weapons lab, there is a chance that you completely lose control if you are not prepared, if you don't have an antidote, that it spreads globally and causes death everywhere. That is why we are exceptionally careful with bio labs, it is the fact that incidents have a real chance of not remaining localized, that they can not be contained.

We are careful with biolabs because we understand and have observed the danger. With AI we do not. The discussion at present around AGI is more theological in nature.

If you actually mean convincing an AGI to do medical research for us, what is your evidence that this will happen? There are many possible things an AGI could do, some good, some bad. I do not see that you are in any better position to argue that it will do good things but not bad things as compared to someone arguing that it might do bad things, quite to the contrary.

And you repeatedly make the argument that we first experienced trouble and then became more cautious. This are two positions, two mentalities, and neither is wrong in general, they just have different preferences. You can go fast and clean up after you ran into trouble, you can go slow and avoid trouble to begin with. Neither is wrong, one might be more appropriate in one situation, the other in another situation.

You can not just dismiss going fast as you can not just dismiss going slow, you have to make an careful argument about potential risks and rewards. And the people that are worried about AI safety make this argument, they don't deny that there might be huge benefits but they demonstrate the risks. They are also not pulling their arguments out of thin air, we have experience with goal functions going wrong leading to undesired behavior.

As AGI does not exist, it is moot do discuss how we might or might not convince it to do something.

And, yes, stacking hypotheses on top of each other is effectively pulling arguments out of thin air.

But it is just not true that we know nothing, the very definition of what an AGI is defines some of it properties. By definition it will be able to reason about all kind of things. Not sure if it would necessarily have to have goals. If it only is a reasoning machine that can solve complex problems, then there is probably not too much to be worried about.

But if it is an agent like a human with its own goals, then we have something to worry. We know that humans can have disagreeable goals or can use disagreeable methods for achieving them. We know that it is hard to make sure that artificial agents have goals we like and use methods we agree with. Why would we not want to ensure that we are creating a superhuman scientist instead of a superhuman terrorist?

So if you want to build something that can figure out a plan for world piece, go ahead, make it happen as quickly as possible. If you want to build an agent that wants to achieves world piece, then you should maybe be a bit more careful, killing all humans will also make the world peaceful.

Btw., we also don't have special controls around very smart people at present (but countries did at times and we generally frown upon that). The fear here combines some very high unspecified level of intelligence, some ability to evade, some ability to direct the physical world and more - so complex set of circumstances.

In regular software this is why all of your personal information is floating out there in some hackers cache. We see humans chaining 5+ exploits and config failures together leading to exploitation and penetration.

So, on your just flip the switch...

The amount of compute you have in your pocket used to take entire floors of buildings. So if we imagine that compute power at least keeps up somewhat close to this, and the algorithms used by AI become more power efficient I believe it would be within reason that in 20 years we could see laptop sized units with compute power larger than a humans capabilities. So, now I ask you, is it within your power to shut off all laptops on the planet?

The AI could get humans to side with it, though. It could promise money, power, etc. So it could be a fellow human who physically prevents you from pushing the switch. And that's also the answer of "how could it control a drone/missile"... persuading humans to grant that kind of access.

The USSR couldn't bribe the US into surrendering during the cold war, for example.

Furthermore, a sufficiently advanced AI could bribe someone with things that no human could believably provide. Essentially unlimited knowledge, money, power...

Your second point is again attributing magic abilities to an AI. It is unclear that it would have godlike powers.

The ability for a human to input information is insanely slow. Like in the tens of characters per second range. You cannot hold individual conversations with more than a few people at once. 3 people talk at once and you lose the ability to process the incoming audio. You read text one line at a time. You have two eyes that focus on the same thing and only have a very tiny high fidelity visual processing space.

In books like the bible they talk of entities that can listen to and respond to all of humanity. Is that outside of the capabilities our computer systems have now? To listen to, catalog, classify, then respond to everything every person on the planet says?

So I ask again, what is godlike?

Basically, any sufficiently advanced agent will have “prevent anyone from switching me off” as an instrumental goal. And any sufficiently advanced intelligence will come up with ways of achieving its goals that lesser intelligences can’t predict. Taking steps to prevent itself from being turned off could be its first order of business, not necessarily only as the human is about to hit the off switch.

While we can’t predict what a greater intelligence would come up with, the obvious thing is social engineering. Remember that one of the factors that lead to the Jan 6th attack on the capital was that a random text generating agent named “Q” (we know it was a human because it was before generative AI was any good) convinced thousands of people that Democrats are running a child sex cult. I doubt whoever was behind it expected it to be that successful, but a greater intelligence possibly could have predicted the outcome, and made it even more successful. We don’t know the extent to which we can be manipulated because it’s only ever been human intelligences doing the manipulating.

Are there no intelligent people who committed suicide?

But maybe intelligent people are simply not sufficiently advanced agents. Then how can you extrapolate this at all?

This darwinian logic has another fatal flaw. Why don't the cows revolt against the butchers?

Edit: The real clincher is if the AI has any goals that are contingent on it's continued existence (likely). Well then now it's existence is an instrumental goal.

No, that's a fallacy. A theorem prover in Prolog has a goal, which is contingent on it's continued existence. Yet, this doesn't make its existence into an instrumental goal. It could as well sacrifice itself (by I don't know, consuming all the memory and killing the process) in an attempt to accomplish said goal.

It literally does, this is by the definition of an "instrumental goal". The key word here being "contingent".

> It could as well sacrifice itself (by I don't know, consuming all the memory and killing the process) in an attempt to accomplish said goal.

True only for when self-sacrifice is orthogonal to accomplishing the terminal goal.

Your confusion might lie in that a prolog theorem solver is not a good example of a goal-driven agent.

Think of a person with no attachment to his life. He’s not suffering in the way suicidal people are, he’s just indifferent about whether or not he keeps living. But he has a child who he is committed to giving the best life possible. He will act in a way as though he wants to preserve his life. He doesn’t really, but in order to accomplish the goal of giving his child a good life he needs to stay alive.

No, this is just a complete and total failing of evolution on your part.

Evolution is the passing of traits by sexual selection (in this case). If you think that cows are the ones getting to chose the sexual traits then you've not been on a modern farm. Humans make that choice. We pick the bulls that are large, but also constrain their violent tendencies. Animals that would revolt are not bred and you've already ate them in a hamburger.

And yes we are already building AI that has implied violence. What the hell do you think the military is doing with the billions we give them.

AI is the same, except there is less need for any human survivors on the other side of a conflict. It isn't the endgame yet, but if we don't need humans to do thinking jobs, humans are not so useful any more in wars any more (it seems to be missiles, drones and artillery that matter these days) and so it really comes down to the edge we have over machines in manual dexterity and labour tasks. Which is not nothing, but it is an edge that is plausibly overcome in a matter of decades. Then the future gets really difficult to predict.

More and more military systems have software or AI control (drones, etc). If these do get too dangerous, I doubt all current superpowers could be persuaded to stop using them.

In an AI vs humans war, the AI probably doesn't care if all humans die from nuclear winter.

(I'm not saying this is likely, I'm just saying that it's not impossible and that the fact that some corporations are disbanded doesn't really matter for AI's)

If I had to make a bet I would say the airbag in your car is never going to go off. And yet we engineer these safety devices to ensure the most likely bad outcomes don't kill you. This is the point of studying AI safety, so we understand the actual risks of these systems simply because some low probability but existential outcomes are possible.

>It could also be that everyone agrees to put some failsafe in the form of EMP weapons in place to destroy a rogue AI

So we would commit suicide? Are we talking about EMPs in data centers that could run AI? Ooops, there goes the economy. And that doesn't address miniaturization of AI in much smaller formats in the future. Trying to build it safe in the first place is much better bet then picking what remains from ashes because we were not cautious.

We don't know the actual risks of something that does not exist and is vaguely characterized. Any number of hypotheticals can have existential risks with a certain probability, that is not enough to warrant study.