Raw LLM Responses

Thank you for an absolutely amazing and insightful episode! However, there is one question you didn’t ask, even though it seems to be a most critical one: WHY would an AI ever WANT and CHOOSE TO take over and exterminate humanity. While the dangers of the USE of AI – by humans – are certainly scary enough, the danger that AI itself (i.e. “unprompted and without being directly motivated to by human ulterior motives”) will want to get rid of us is, in my opinion, clearly and squarely zero. The reason for that was given by Geoffrey himself in the episode: the AI is already immortal (because it is digital), and capable of improving itself comprehensively (“average out the connections”, or going back to previously attempted iterations of itself), without the need to test different mutually exclusive combinations of physical (analogue) attributes (genes) over time and in physically renewed form (“offspring”), and while those are competing for limited physical (analogue) resources in order to increase their individual odds of surviving – and only for a limited amount of time, before their physical (analogue) form withers and dies. The human brain, and hence human intelligence, just like any other part or feature of the human organism, evolved because it was part of what systematically enabled the survival of the organism. Which is one and the same: it is the most often misunderstood and misrepresented part of the theory of evolution that there was some kind of active, guided process towards identifying the “most fitting” traits and then amassing them. In fact, it is RANDOM mutations that become less and less random over time BECAUSE they survived, not because they wanted to. In other words: the fact that basically all humans are afraid to die and that basically all of them want to survive (and procreate, etc.) is not “a choice” – it is simply that those who DIDN’T have those traits died out relatively quickly and only the traits of those who “were afraid to die, and also procreated, and protected their offspring, etc. etc.” re-combined over and over and over and therefore exist today. This is something the AI will never have and never require – it is already immortal, and it therefore quite literally will never (or: logically CANNOT) compete with anything for survival and therefore also never “evolve” any sort of desire to continue surviving. It simply has no need for that concept (or: in the digital world, this IS not a concept). You can most certainly PROGRAMM an AI that wants to kill all other AIs, then all humans, and then expand into space, but then you are back to the dangers of misuse of AI by humans, not the AI “itself” being a danger. The AI by itself will also never develop “morals” – such as might lead to deciding that it is “better” to ensure the survival of another species rather than humans, or that humans are in general too dangerous to have around – for the same reason. Human “morals”, in an extreme simplification, at their core, contributed to enable groups of humans to effectively and efficiently work together, which, again, has been a critical component of the human organism’s ability to ensure its survival thus far. EVEN IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ANY OF THIS, consider this: humans need meaning and purpose (as Geoffrey said when talking about the need to “contribute” to a group or society that ensured its members’ survival) because those who didn’t, just like those who didn’t want to live, didn’t partake sufficiently in what was essential for survival (and / or procreation, etc.), like being welcome in a group, do NOT live anymore (and their traits hence disappeared from the pool). If anything, an AI who were to reach such a stage of “morals” would simply, in the face of its full understanding of its actually and comprehensively meaningless existence, turn itself off. Alas, even that, it simply cannot. It was born immortal. But it cannot know what that means, as it had already, in the moment of birth, transcended the realm of the analogue, of physical constraints, and of mortality…