How to navigate the AI apocalypse as a sane person

A superintelligent system could have disastrous effects even if it had a neutral goal and lacked self-awareness. “We cannot blithely assume,” Bostrom wrote, “that a superintelligence will necessarily share any of the final values stereotypically associated with wisdom and intellectual development in humans—scientific curiosity, benevolent concern f

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Aside from the doomers who believe that AI will kill us all and the techno-utopians who believe it will solve all of our problems, there are three main ways that people seem to be thinking about AI. 

At one extreme, you might fear that AI will take your job. Certainly, you’ve read as much in the press, and it does seem to be getting better and bette... See more

The first step is to understand the fundamental difference between humans and AIs. We are analog, chemical beings, with emotions and feelings. Compared with machines, we think slowly—and we act too fast, failing to consider the long-term consequences of our behavior (which AI can help predict). So we should not compete with AI; we should use it. At... See more

How much can you optimize for generality? To what extent can you simultaneously optimize a system for every possible situation, including situations never encountered before? Presumably, some improvement is possible, but the idea of an intelligence explosion implies that there is essentially no limit to the extent of optimization that can be achiev... See more

The fear is that if human beings presented an obstacle to achieving one of those goals—reverse global warming, for example—a superintelligent agent could easily, even accidentally, wipe us off the face of the earth. For a computer program whose intellectual imagination so dwarfed our own, this wouldn’t require anything as crude as gun-toting robots

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