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Ramez Naam
@ramez
Climate and clean energy investor. Author of 5 books. Energy & Environment co-chair @SingularityU. Trying to build a better world.
Joined May 2007
9.9K Following    59.9K Followers
In general, harmful events follow a power law distribution of size. That's true of accidents, terrorist attacks, cyber, & war. We should expect the same of AI accidents & malicious use. That's good news, as the much larger number of small events will help us boost safety.
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I don't buy that AI is a threat to humanity for a nerdy statistical reason. My views are informed by the statistics of things like war. If you look at deaths from human conflicts, you get a continuous spectrum from lots of small events causing a few dozen deaths to rare outliers killing tens of millions. In my own research, I've studied complex diseases where the overall outcome reflects hundreds of genetic factors combining in different ways. So if AI can kill billions of people, I would expect to see some version of the same thing: smaller events where one or two of the relevant causal mechanisms are operating, larger events where several combine, and catastrophic events where everything goes wrong at once. Instead, what we seem to have is real evidence of a few suicides and isolated harms at one end, and wild speculation about complete apocalypse at the other. That massive discontinuity makes me very skeptical that the AI catastrophic-risk story is real.
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