‘Replacement for Humanity’: AI Safety Expert Warns of ‘Dystopian’ Reality After OpenAI Cyberattack

Piers Morgan Uncensored

AI safety researcher Dr. Roman Yampolskiy insisted we don’t need AI to become a “replacement for humanity” following the OpenAI Hugging Face attack.

The topic was introduced by Piers Morgan on Piers Morgan Uncensored Friday.

“I think anyone building killer robots, which by definition are excellent at killing humans, is doing something unethical, something immoral. It’s easy to justify, but it’s not what we see,” Yampolskiy explained.

Yampolskiy continued:

We see drone warfare now killing more people than previously. It’s so much easier to deploy. It’s easier to go to work. [The] cost of going to war is lower. So I think it’s a terrible thing. We are worried about superintelligence becoming an adversary, and here we are converting humanoid robot bias into killing machines. This is dystopian.

I don’t know why anyone would think it’s a good idea, and to address concerns of need, to clearly spend more time thinking about it than anyone. I think a lot of benefits we want, including healing bad diseases, life extension, can be accomplished with narrow super intelligent tools. It doesn’t have to be general superintelligence. We can do something similar to what we did for protein folding problems. That problem was solved with a very narrow but superintelligent tool. We don’t have to be replacement for humanity.

Earlier in the segment, entrepreneur Sankaet Pathak, the CEO of Foundation Future Industries (also known as Foundation Robotics) offered a robust defense of AI technology, which prompted Yampolskiy’s reply.

“I do not think what happened with OpenAI is a red herring,” Pathak insisted. “What happened with OpenAI, based on every piece of information that’s available today, probably says that they have really bad observability, which most likely is code written by AI or written by humans, that does not mean that they have an AI that is really good at escaping and then wreaking some kind of big panic for humanity.”

Pathak added:

That pretty much means they have poor security controls, and that is an age-old problem that each company deals with. So I just think that specific example is not as big of a red herring. Now, I do not think we should be totally nonchalant about AI posing risks to humanity because they do, like pretty much what I said before. At any point, when AI is able to self-replicate, self-improve, and do it at a footprint that is so small compute-wise that it does not require large compute clusters, that is an unbound risk to humanity that does pose significant danger, and we should we should figure out what to do about it before it even happens. However, I don’t think we should pause AI progress that’s happening today.

Pathak also said, “We should build more intelligent weapons.” As he put it, “By definition, not building intelligent weapons would mean we would still fight wars like how we did during World War One or even before, which create which created significant amounts of collateral damage. Intelligence is a good thing in war, because that, by definition, means less people who are innocent get hurt.”

Watch the above via Piers Morgan Uncensored.

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