Hossenfelder: Wake up, people! The private companies that dominate AI are going to rule the world.

Hossenfelder:

Most politicians totally misunderstand the trouble that artificial intelligence is going to bring. This isn’t a race for profit, it’s a race for power. And that power will be in the hands of a few very rich people. Does that sound like a good future?

From the video:

2:36: The mistake that all these politicians make is to think of AI as a race for profit or prosperity. But this is much rawer. It’s a race for power. Whoever will first be in possession of AI with superhuman intelligence will rule the world. And at that point it won’t matter where the company is registered, because they’ll have multiple backups elsewhere to avoid a forced nationalization. Because once governments realize that they are no longer in control, that’s what they will try. But by then it’ll be too late. [...]

3:55: A good way to think about the “frontier models” is as a new operating system. Technically it’s not what they are, but practically, it’s how we will use them. You will sign up to one of them and use that AI to do everything on your devices. You'll use AI to write your emails, pay your bills, and procrastinate better than ever before. And for governments and other companies, that will become indispensable quickly. If they don’t sign up, they won’t be able to compete. They will need access for their financial management, military strategies, policy evaluations, everything. Not having AI access in 5 years will be like giving up on the internet today. And who will control that access? The people who own the companies. [...]

5:47: And this is what the AI race is about. It’s about world-domination. Why is Elon suing OpenAI and building his own AI if he doesn’t need the money and has enough on his hands already? It’s because he wants to rule the world. What sense does it make that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, declares both that superintelligent AI is going to be super dangerous and that the only way to find out how dangerous is to actually build it. If it’s so dangerous, why doesn’t he worry? Because he’ll be the one in power. The rest of us will be living in the metaverse, mining bitcoin to pay his energy bills. [...]

6:53: If I was the Queen of Europe, I would take the money which was earmarked for that bigger particle collider, a few dozen billion dollars or so, and instead pour it into a publicly owned frontier model like yesterday. Because otherwise, Europe will be in even bigger trouble 5 years down the line than it is now.