
Tomorrow’s world
The tech wizards courting disaster
In 2022, says Ezra Klein in The New York Times, AI experts were asked how likely it was that people would lose control of future advanced AI systems, causing “human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species”. The median reply was 10%. It may be “hard to fathom” why so many bright sparks are slogging away to create something they think has a 10% chance of wiping out humanity. But I regularly spend time with these geeks, and “I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is”. It is a community living with an “altered sense of time and consequence”. They are “creating a power they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe”.