What’s interesting, to me, is that’s exactly how people hedge in the fringe UFO community too.

Ha! True. Very true. I find this scenario compelling but it’s based on a series of assumptions which individually seem plausible but I have no way to evaluate them all together. It’s like the Drake Equation; because the probabilities are multiplicative even tiny adjustments to a few of them end up making a huge difference to the final answer.

The thing is though, if there really is even a tiny chance of the ultimate outcome of this thought experiment being true (i.e. the end of humanity) then we should probably address it. And what that would look like is stopping the AI companies from doing any more research until they can prove their model will be safe, which should make people who are more concerned about AI slop happy too. Everybody wins by hitting the brakes. (Edit: well, Sam Altman doesn’t but I’m not going to lose sleep over that.)