While much of the tech world is agog over the multitude of ways AI could change our lives and world for the better, a certain sector of Silicon Valley experts feels quite differently about the advancement. For them, AI is a harbinger of doom, an invention that is poised to end life as we know it.
Those in the know have a range of feelings about the future of AI, according to Business Insider. Some believe that AI will instigate an age of superabundance, where most labor can be automated, and our time will free up. Others are bracing for an economic catastrophe, believing that AI will so wholly disrupt our economy that we'll be thrust back into a medieval class system.
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Then, there's the last group that believes that AI will soon wrest free of human control and gain authority over the organic world.
"A lot of us are just going to look back on these next two years as the time when we could have done something,” an AI researcher named Henry told the outlet. “Lots of people will look back on this and be like, ‘Why didn’t I quit my job and try to do something that really mattered when I had a chance to?'”
Business Insider says that the AI doomsdayers in Henry's camp often refer to a C.S. Lewis quote when discussing how they are choosing to spend the time they have left. "If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs," the quote reads.
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“It’s really freeing in some ways,” Aella, a fetish researcher and San Francisco sex worker with concerns about the future of AI, says. "I like throwing weird orgies, and I’m like — well, we’re going to die. What’s a weirder, more intense, crazier orgy we can do? Just do it now.”
Venture capitalist investor Vishal Maini has a similar, if less hedonistic, thought process. "I think it makes sense to just adopt a little bit of a bucket-list-mentality around this,” he says. “Do what’s important to you in the time that we have.”
Henry, the AI researcher, has chosen to spend this in-between time in a more extreme way, working in safety-focused AI research and building DIY doomsday shelters for himself and his loved ones. "The main scenario I think about is the one where misaligned superintelligence AI takes over," he told the website.
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Of course, not all AI experts have bought into this line of thinking. Vanderbilt University Assistant Professor of Philosophy David Thorstad explains the split between in-groups this way to Business Insider, "I think that there are lots of communities, particularly in the Bay Area where groups of very smart, like-minded people live together, work together, read similar forums and podcasts, and when they get very immersed in a particular kind of an extreme worldview about AI, it tends to be very hard to break out.”
Daniel Kokotajlo, an AI researcher who previously worked at OpenAI, agrees, reasoning that even if AI outcomes are bad, excessive prepping isn't likely to make much of a difference.
“I think more likely it’s either we’re all dead, or we’re all fine,” he told Business Insider “I think if I spent a few weeks I could make a bug-out bag and make a bioshelter or whatever, and then in some sliver of possible futures it would save my family. But it is just more important for me to do my actual job than to do that.”
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