What if superintelligence is just weak? — LessWrong
Dean Ball is a pretty big voice in AI policy – over 19k subscribers on his newsletter, and a former Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the Trump White House – so why does he disagree that AI poses an existential danger to humanity? In short, he holds the common view that superintelligence (ASI) simply won’t be that powerful. I strongly disagree, and I think he makes a couple of invalid leaps to arrive there. His main flawed argument is that he implies AI must be omnipotent and omniscient to wipe us out and then explains why that won’t be the case. He states: “one common assumption… among many people in ‘the AI safety community’ is that artificial superintelligence will be able to ‘do anything.’” He then argues that “intelligence is neither omniscience nor omnipotence,” and that even a misaligned AI with “no [..] safeguards to hinder it” would “still fail” because taking over the world “involves too many steps that require capital, interfacing with hard-to-predict complex systems.” But omn