Behind the escalating warnings about superintelligence is a more fundamental issue, critics argue: There is no established path showing that today’s AI systems will surpass the smartest humans, much less a scientific basis for calculating the likelihood that such systems will destroy humanity. Yet the doomer narrative has increasingly overshadowed AI’s more immediate and concrete risks, while boosting the very companies whose products are being portrayed as extraordinarily powerful and potentially uncontrollable.
“I think Anthropic and OpenAI benefit a lot from claims that their system—their products, not science products—are so powerful that they might end humanity,” says David Widder, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “That’s, in some ways, capitalizing on fear to sell things, or at least to garner investment, garner interest in how powerful their systems are.”
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These concrete risks, Bender explains, range from environmental harms to labor exploitation and the theft of creative work and everyday data. She also points to widespread surveillance and the degradation of social services as people are encouraged to believe that machines can take over certain tasks once performed by humans.
“All of those are real harms that the public and policymakers should be focusing on, and instead we have Senator Sanders introducing a bill that is very much speaking to this fantasy of an all-powerful doomer show,” she adds, referring to Sanders’ proposed ban on superintelligence and a pause on development of advanced AI.
I know this has been covered a lot here, but I especially appreciate this from a publication concerned with an actual existential risk to humanity, that being nuclear war, which is a risk that has MASSIVELY risen in the last decade or so.
