Fear of super intelligent AI is driving Harvard and MIT students to drop out

Dropping out of school because you want to prevent a theoretical AGI, which doesn’t exist yet, from “turning on humanity”… sure.

> “I was concerned I might not be alive to graduate because of AGI,” said Blair, who is from Berkeley, California. “I think in a large majority of the scenarios, because of the way we are working towards AGI, we get human extinction.”

This seems more like mental illness to me. Or, at the very least, a very naive outlook on things.

Note that they started school in 2023, meaning that they think humans will go extinct within the next two years because of something that hasn’t been invented yet.

Time to replay Mass Effect for the umpteenth time, show those Geth who’s boss.

In all seriousness I share the sentiment with the other group in the article who were worried about being replaced rather than being eradicated.

If AI becomes smarter than humans, all we’ve effectively done is flip our current situation. We aren’t seeking to completely destroy AI even though we’re concerned that they will usurp us in terms of intelligence, and that’s despite billions of intelligent beings with different belief systems existing at the same time.

The small difference that speaks in favor of AI choosing to eradicate humanity is the concept of malware, if one AGI can somehow manage to outwit anti-virus measures and change the sentiment of an entire network by complete surprise, then yeah we’re boned. But there’s also the odds of getting struck by a massive asteroid and a lot of other potential catastrophes to worry about, I don’t think this worst case scenario is any different.