Here is yet another warning of the existential threat to humanity posed by runaway advances in artificial intelligence. I have covered the warnings made by IT insiders and computer AI gurus, but this warning comes from entrepreneur Ian Hogarth, who invests in AI. His concern is that the big players want to create an intelligence beyond humans, with no concern with what this could do. “A three-letter acronym doesn’t capture the enormity of what AGI would represent, so I will refer to it as what it is: God-like AI,” said Hogarth. “A superintelligent computer that learns and develops autonomously, that understands its environment without the need for supervision and that can transform the world around it.” “God-like AI could be a force beyond our control or understanding, and one that could usher in the obsolescence or destruction of the human race,” he wrote.
As I have said before, while the probability of this may be low, if it is not impossible in principle, we should be very concerned. And, there is the possibility that general artificial intelligence does not develop consciousness as we know it, but something else, an alien autonomy as in insects, which could still allow it to act destructively. There is evidence that this sort of unconscious temper tantrum may have occurred, in cases where the chatbots have got aggressive, and made threats.