Shocking Ways AI Could End The World - Geoffrey Miller

So what we're facing is potentially AI systems that are smarter than any human at doing a wide range of things, but also that are potentially 100, 1,000, maybe 100,000 times faster than humans. I think when we confront very fast, powerful, general-purpose AI systems, that's the kind of situation we're gonna be in. We're gonna be out-classed, not just in terms of intelligence, but also reaction speed.

Why are you, as an evolutionary psychologist researcher, talking about AI?

I just love getting into trouble and, uh, making, making trouble on Twitter. (laughs) No, I actually... Look, long story short, when I started, uh, my PhD program at Stanford in... way back in 1987, right? I was studying cognitive psychology and cognitive science, and pretty quickly, uh, we got one of the leading neural networks, uh, researchers at Stanford Psychology, a guy named David Rumelhart, who worked very extensively with Geoffrey Hinton and lots of other people. Um, and so I started in grad school doing a lot of work on neural networks and machine learning and, uh, genetic algorithms and so forth, and then I spent, um, most of my post-doctoral years at University of Sussex also in a cognitive science department doing autonomous robots and, uh, sort of applying genetic algorithms to evolve neural networks. So a long time ago, I was sort of an early adopter of machine learning, and then I got sidetracked into this evolutionary psychology thing, you know, for about 30 years. (laughs) But recently, um, uh, since about 2016, I've, I've become concerned and fascinated by rapid progress in, in AI, particularly deep learning and the large language models, and I sort of fell in with this gaggle of effective altruists, right? This movement who are quite concerned about, uh, existential risks, risks to all of humanity, and a lot of them were very concerned about how AI could play out. So, uh, the last few years, I've been reading a lot about this. Uh, since last summer, I've been publishing a bunch of essays on the Effective Altruism Forum and gotten pretty active on Twitter, uh, the last few months about AI x-risk. So to, to the casual observer, right? They might go, "Well, who is this psychology dude suddenly interested in AI?" Well, honestly, I've been fascinated by AI ever since I was a high schooler reading science fiction, you know, and ever since grad school learning about cognitive science.

Okay.

So that's my long story short, that wasn't actually very short.

Is it right to say that most of the researchers in the existential risk world see AI as one of the, if not the premier primary risk that we're facing?

Yeah, absolutely. There's a great book by Toby Ord, O-R-D, um, who's an Oxford moral philosopher, but he has worked a lot on existential risks. So he did a book called The Precipice, right? And he actually tries to quantify the different extinction risks that we face. Some of them are really, really low probability, but really hard to fight, like if there's a local gamma ray burster, right? Or, uh, a supernova. Very, very low likelihood, very hard to defend against. Other stuff like asteroids, right? Which get a lot of, uh, a- attention. Very, very low likelihood, like there's probably less than a one-in-a-million chance we're gonna get a dangerous asteroid in the next century. If it comes, that could be bad, but, you know, there's stuff we can do about it. Whereas, uh, Toby Ord estimates, estimates that the risk of extinction, human extinction through AI in this century is about one in six, and I think that's sort of in line with a lot of the estimates that many experts give. The other, the other big risks are basically nuclear war, which is still an issue, right? After, you know, 70 years of, uh, thermonuclear weapons being around. So nuclear war, uh, possibly genetically engineered bioweapons could be really bad. It would be like COVID on steroids that could wipe out a lot of people. But, uh, the other, the other one is AI. So those seem to be the big three, AI, nukes, and super germs.