When imagining some new, unprecedented piece of future history, there is a temptation to fall into imagining… — Eliezer Yudkowsky
When imagining some new, unprecedented piece of future history, there is a temptation to fall into imagining that it will all go sensibly, rather than the way things usually go in history books. People sometimes ask us: How could the AI companies possibly be doing this thing, if matters are as we say? And maybe the simplest real answer is: Because this is the sort of awful, sad, real situation that you read about in history books, and not in the sensible world that exists only in imagination.
p. 197Source: 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
