Either that or gravity, anyways. WaPo has an article on the concerns in academia WRT artificial intelligence:
To prevent this theoretical but cataclysmic outcome, mission-driven labs like DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to build a good kind of AI programmed not to lie, deceive or kill us. Meanwhile, donors such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, disgracedFTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn and ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin — as well as institutions like Open Philanthropy, a charitable organization started by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz —have worked to push doomsayers from the tech industry’s margins into the mainstream.
More recently, wealthy tech philanthropists have begun recruiting an army of elite college students to prioritize the fight against rogue AI over other threats. Open Philanthropy alone has funneled nearly half a billion dollars into developing a pipeline of talent to fight rogue AI, building a scaffolding of think tanks, YouTube channels, prize competitions, grants, research funding and scholarships — as well as a new fellowship that can pay student leaders as much as $80,000 a year, plus tens of thousands of dollars in expenses.
For such a long article, I thought it was striking that there no mention of energy and how it relates to AI. Given that AI sucks down power, much like cryptocurrency, it’s worth remembering that wars aren’t just about land, but about energy as well.
AI may result in our demise – not chased down like rats by our Terminator successors, but by each other in our jealous competition to feed the maws of our AIs.
