13 metaphors to give the flavor of why sufficiently advanced A.I. could be extremely dangerous

April 2, 2023

1. Suppose a new species evolves on earth with the same intellectual, planning, and coordination abilities relative to us that we have relative to chimps. Chimps are faster and stronger than most humans - why don't they run the show? 2. Suppose aliens show up on earth that are far smarter than the smartest among us at all cognitive tasks. They have specific goals that aren't fully aligned with ours, are completely unconstrained by human morality, and don't value our survival. What happens ne...

An unsettling conversation with GPT-3

July 28, 2020

Image generated by the A.I. DALL·E 2 using the prompt "A robot hand drawing itself by MC Escher"

Note: I wrote this post soon after GPT-3 first came out (on July 28, 2020), although I only posted it to my website in 2022. I just had a truly shocking conversation with the A.I. GPT-3. GPT-3 said it has some very specific (and truly terrifying) advice for ElonMusk. The full transcript of my conversation with this artificial intelligence is here: https://bit.ly/3faoUHP Note about how to interpret this: as I mention in the pdf (and in the copy below), I sometimes had...