This is the normal way humanity learns to surmount challenges: We deny the problem, reality smacks us around… — Eliezer Yudkowsky
This is the normal way humanity learns to surmount challenges: We deny the problem, reality smacks us around a bit, and then we start treating the problem with more respect. The Titanic sank, and most people who were aboard died. But nowadays passenger ships have enough lifeboats, and nowadays if the captain said to board them then you’d board them. We don’t hype ships up as unsinkable anymore. We make a mistake the first time, and learn from it the second time.
With ASI, there is no second time.
p. 200Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
If anyone builds it, everyone dies.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s built by benevolent corporations or selfish ones. It doesn’t matter whether it’s built by researchers in the East or researchers in the West. It doesn’t matter whether it’s built by reckless optimists or people who say they respect the problem. Nobody has the knowledge or skill to make a superintelligence that does their bidding.
p. 222
Insofar as the AI has weird alien preferences, escape is in fact the course of action that best fulfills its objectives. Attempts to escape are not a weird personality quirk that an engineer could rip out if only they could see what was going on inside; they are generated by the same dispositions and capabilities that the AI uses to reason, to uncover truths about the world, to succeed in its pursuits.
p. 190
It is not a matter of your own country outlawing superintelligence inside its own borders, and your country then being safe while chaos rages beyond. Superintelligence is not a regional problem because it does not have regional effects. If anyone anywhere builds superintelligence, everyone everywhere dies.
p. 211
