Ryan Greenblatt on the 4 most likely ways for AI to take over, and the case for and against AGI in under 8 years | 80,000 Hours
I think pretty quickly into this regime, AI takeover using a variety of mechanisms becomes pretty plausible and potentially surprisingly easy through a variety of routes. … A thing that seems very plausible to me is: you’ve handed things off to the AI system, and you’re still trying to oversee it, you’re still trying to understand what’s going on. But it might be that the AI can run a “rogue deployment,” where they can basically use a bunch of the compute in an unmonitored way because they’re writing so much of the stuff, so much is happening so quickly that they can evade your safeguards… In addition to that, these AIs could be doing things like backdooring the future AI training runs, making sure the AIs are aligned to them instead of aligned to you, and doing a huge amount of work that you might just not know what’s going on anymore. Even at the most basic level of what code was run, you might just be misled about that specific thing because things are going so fast and so out of yo