Existential threat to humanity remains one of the major concerns among people regarding the rapid prevalence of generative AI, aside from privacy, security, and job security. AI safety researcher Roman Yampolskiy warns there's a 99.999999% probability AI will end humanity.
In a recent podcast episode with Dwarkesh Patel, Anthropic researchers sounded an alarm on the rapid development and advancements in the AI landscape. Perhaps more concerning, researchers Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken claimed that humans might soon be reduced to "meat robots" for next-gen AI models (via Futurism).
Anthropic's Sholto Douglas claimed that the AI age will present humanity with a "whole spectrum of crazy futures." He claimed that one of these scenarios could present itself within the next 2-5 years, contributing to a drop in white-collar workers.
Interestingly, Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei has been vocal about AI's threat to job security, further indicating that the technology will slash 50% of entry-level white collar jobs, completely looking at the gateway to the job market for Gen Z.
Anthropic researcher Trenton Bricken had a more concerning theory, claiming:
"The really scary future is one in which AIs can do everything except for the physical robotic tasks, In which case, you’ll have humans with AirPods, and glasses and there’ll be some robot overlord controlling the human through cameras by just telling it what to do."
The researchers claimed that we're in for a wild ride as AI scales greater heights. "Basically, you're having human meat robots," Bricken added. "Not necessarily saying that that's what the AIs would want to do or anything like that," Douglas interjected.
Who will win the AGI race?
Top AI labs are seemingly trapped in a hamster wheel chasing AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which has seemingly turned into a buzzword with a different meaning depending on who's speaking.
Last week, I reported on Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella shifting focus from chasing AGI to delivering real societal impact using AI, as OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman leaned more on self-replication.
The AI age is quite scary if you ask me, and if everything we've learned so far is anything to go by. Yampolskiy claims that the AGI race could be won by whichever company has enough money to buy enough computing power to build AGI.
Interestingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that the company was no longer compute-constrained. Shortly after, Microsoft reportedly wiggled out of two mega data center deals because it didn't want to continue providing additional training support for ChatGPT.
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