Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, it's all true!
It's now basically inevitable that we'll have AGI superintelligence by the end of 2024.
And there's a 10% chance this AGI superintelligence, which will basically be LLM software running on physical hardware that fills a massive data centre with the energy and water use of a small European country, will cause humans to go extinct by 2030.
And by extinct, I don't mean as a result of climate change from the fossil fuel air pollution we're using to fuel it. Please don't think about that stuff!
No, I mean by, erm... Things like hacking the power grid and such... Which would also presumably cause it to cease existing... Which wouldn't exactly be superintelligent.
But... y'know... details!
How will we ever stop it?!
I mean, it's not like we live in a world where less intelligent creatures and even inanimate objects kill off more intelligent creatures every day.
It's not like we live in a world where virii and microbes and bricks can kill off more intelligent creatures.
Brains beat brawn every time!
Put a statistician in a fight with an MMA champion and clearly the maths professor is going to win, right?
And if that doesn't sound true when it's phrased like that, then you need to just shush for a moment and pretend that it does.
And if one of our LLMs in a massive hyperscale AI data centre somehow magically became sentient, it's not like we could just shut off the water. Or the electricity. Or stop delivering massive quantities of gas and oil to the onsite gas turbines.
Or just find the nearest Telstra pit and put a bloody shovel through the fibre optic cables that connect it to the outside world.
So we need to immediately figure out ways to stop this happening!
What's that?
You say we could prevent this happening by just not building the massive AI data centres?
You say we could tax the rich so they don't have the money to build massive AI data centres?
No! We absolutely must not do that under any circumstances!
See, our position is really quite straightforward.
We're claiming our product poses an existential risk to humanity that justifies urgent action to mitigate the risk, but also simultaneously we don't want you to think it /genuinely/ poses an existential risk to humanity that /actually/ justifies urgent action that would be guaranteed mitigate the risk, such as not building massive AI data centres, or by not providing access to the ginormous quantities of water and land and energy and capital that our product which is causing this supposed threat depends on.
So why say it?
Mostly, because if we say things like: "We can make a product that could make massive monopolistic short-term profits in a few years, but there's a 10% chance it kills everyone alive, give us money to build it," then the Silicon Valley VCs and Wall Street bankers will throw literal billions our way.
Whereas if we were to say: "We can make a product that solves a genuine problem and we have a sustainable business model for it that will deliver stable long-term returns," then they won't.
Because under American capitalism, "a chance it kills every person" is seen to be a worthwhile risk to take in exchange for short-term profits.
I really hope that clarifies our argument.
#AI #LLM #DataCenter #DataCentre #GenAI #tech #Anthropic #OpenAI #Google #Microsoft #Gemini #Copilot #Claude #AGI #capitalism #aimarketing #BigTech #tech
🖖
