Can you imagine any ways in which that kind of AI can be used for good (or less bad), however unlikely?
If yes, become an AI researcher/policy shaper or donate to groups that might be able to make progress towards the better outcomes.
The individual use-cases don’t matter. What matters are the points of contact between AI as a concept and the fundamental economics of human life as we know it. AI will change the economics of life in very fundamental and very negative ways. Why does it matter or help to be active some branch of AI in particular? It won’t change this!
The only solution to this problem is the banishment of AI. There is no other way to preserve life as we know it. AI might not provoke these changes within my lifetime. But people are very happy to protest and march for global warming even though it also will not end the world within our lifetime. There is a strange cognitive dissonance there. The logic is very similar: even if there is a small chance that it could end the world, better to err on the side of caution. The consequences of AI will be indescribably worse for humans than global warming, so why not exercise caution?
Because the arguments for global warming eventually ending the world are so far much stronger. The endgame for AI is much less clear and therefore the final outcome much less certain.
I admit, I don't understand people who think that 'Global Warming will eventually end the world'. I'm not denying it exists, nor that it can be devastating but end the world? No credible projections I've seen suggest that it will end up killing every human or blow up the planet or whatever you mean by that.
Is it a case that 'the enemy' is saying Global Warming isn't real, so there is a push to reply that not only is it real, but even worse than we expect? A concious hyperbole so people will pay more attention to a real problem you perceive as neglected? An actual belief that it will genuinely end the world because you've heard it will be very bad so you conflate it with being the worst thing possible?
You're reading too much into what I said. I didn't mean to imply that global warming will end the world with certainty and definitely not that the planet will blow up. I simply meant that the probability of the world (in the sense of the human civilization in its current form; definitely not the planet itself) ending from global warming is greater than it ending from god-like AGI.
I don't consider this a controversial statement. From my own reading of the relevant studies, I think there is definitely a non-negligible probability that runaway effects may make Earth very harsh or even completely unsuitable for human life, eventually. Are you saying the current studies outrule this scenario entirely or with near certainty?
That depends on a lot of factors which I am unconvinced can be determined beforehand. I agree that the worst-case AGI scenario is worse than the worst-case global warming scenario.
Nothing is determined beforehand, you use what you know to try and guess what will happen. How can you look at it all, and my comments, and not think that the outcomes I’ve described are a very good guess? It doesn’t have to be definitive. GW is not definitively proven. All you need is to show that there seems to be a chance that something really bad will happen. How have have I not done that? What link in the chain is ambiguous to you?
