Researcher Nate Soares, AI ‘doomer’ in Berkeley, predicts the end of humanity: “It’s madness to let them try”
Will AI destroy us? That’s the very serious theory I learned about while reading the equally serious newspaper Le Monde (which I still browse in paper format while dipping my croissants in a cup of café au lait in the morning at the dining table of my townhouse in the suburbs of Roubaix (59), a very beautiful textile city I recommend visiting): a theory staunchly supported by real AI researchers, with numerous degrees, hidden in some obscure corners of Silicon Valley, who genuinely believe that if we continue trying to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), we will be punished and thus destroyed. In a few years, if this continues, AIs will take over and turn us into pâté to feed the cats. I don’t know if that would be good news for us or the felines.
I don’t know what you think, but it really makes me question things.
If AI is to destroy us, how will it happen?
Will it create an army of robots like in Terminator?
Will it kill us by tampering with our connected devices? Any device could then become a lethal weapon and we would be safe nowhere. Imagine your smart fridge lunging at you to crush you or your intelligent toaster grabbing your fingers to burn them!
Will it take control of our computers and prevent us from browsing social media for more than 3 hours? (that would only kill teenagers, but it would be a good start)
Will it create a virus itself and spread it across the planet after injecting it into a Chinese pangolin? (Don’t laugh, it’s one of the theories)
All this terrifies me and I now think we should never have created this AI. It’s a shame we haven’t invented a time machine yet, we could have gone back to kill Alan Turing and AI would never have existed. No one would have ever heard of it. The English wouldn’t have decrypted the Enigma machine, they wouldn’t have been able to prevent the Germans from invading them, and we might have lost the war.
No, no, it would have been even worse today. We would have to speak German, which is a very difficult language to learn, and since I only had a 4 average in high school, I would surely have been banned from my own country. We would have to eat sauerkraut every day and currywurst, or worse yet, knödels. Hmm, no, that would have been too horrible. Better to be massacred by a mutant robot created by AI than to eat German specialties every day.
Or maybe we shouldn’t have invented computing or electricity. Imagine doing deep learning with a Pascaline, we wouldn’t get far. I don’t know. Now that I know what we risk, I completely regret feeding AIs with my photos and prompts. For all I know, it might be because of me that AGI will be achieved, because I fed ChatGPT with my meager knowledge.
What an anxiety, really!
Sometimes, I think humanity would have been much more peaceful if it hadn’t invented all these technologies. These things that are supposed to make life more convenient, but make us so anxious. We worried less when we were in loincloths in caves. It was simpler.
And the more I think about it, the more I really feel that AI will destroy me and that it will be partly my fault. Sometimes, really, we would be better off not reading the newspaper (even in paper).
