How bad could it be? If you ask the researchers at Anthropic, even if progress stalls out here, current algorithms will automate all white collar work within the next five years: it’s just a matter of collecting the relevant data and spoonfeeding it to the models. In the worst-case scenario, highly repetitive manual labour becomes the last frontier... See more

So why wouldn’t a fledgling AI—even one destined to eventually become very wise and good—do some serious damage before it grows up? Will it be more like a child, learning slowly under our guidance? What will its ‘pulling the wings off flies’ phase look like? Will it treat us as abysmally as we treat other animals?

Even an AI that can think at... See more

A mind with the ability to create new knowledge will necessarily be a universal explainer, meaning it will converge upon good moral explanations. If it’s more advanced than us, it will be morally superior to us: the trope of a superintelligent AI obsessively converting the universe into paperclips is exactly as silly as it sounds.