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If machines become superintelligent we\u2019re toast, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Should we believe them?\nWhat if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you\u2019d say, until I mentioned that the reason you\u2019d stop worrying was because the book says our species only has a few years before it\u2019s wiped out by superintelligent AI anyway.
\nWe don\u2019t know what form this extinction will take exactly \u2013 perhaps an energy-hungry AI will let the millions of fusion power stations it has built run hot, boiling the oceans. Maybe it will want to reconfigure the atoms in our bodies into something more useful. There are many possibilities, almost all of them bad, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who knows which will come true. But just as you can predict that an ice cube dropped into hot water will melt without knowing where any of its individual molecules will end up, you can be sure an AI that\u2019s smarter than a human being will kill us all, somehow. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If machines become superintelligent we\u2019re toast, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Should we believe them? What if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you\u2019d say, until I mentioned that the reason you\u2019d stop worrying was because the book …<\/p>\n