Arvind Narayanan

One thing I strongly believe is that we should not be thinking about this in terms of probabilities.

At the moment, you're arguing about what the probability is.

You're already down a very confusing path that can only lead to, I think, misleading guidance.

So I've looked at the most sophisticated efforts that we have for estimating these probabilities.

It was led by the Forecasting Research Institute.

I actually work with these folks.

I know them well.

They're incredibly smart, and they did...

a really well thought out effort to get dozens of expert forecasters to discuss, try to change each other's minds and provide these probabilities.

And they put out a 753 page report.

And I've read that 753 page report.

And you could have a room with these so-called super forecasters debating, and you could have a room with a bunch of people who are high and debating what the future of AI is going to be, and you can't tell the difference.

And this is no slight to the super forecasters.

whom I know, they're incredibly smart people.

But the thing is, we have no empirical basis for predicting what these probabilities might be.

The arguments that people are giving, it's things like, oh, you know, AI might decide to colonize

space instead of Earth.

So even if we had super intelligent AI, maybe the probability is not as high as we think.

Or someone else thinks, oh, AI might decide that killing all humans will make the planet cooler, and it helps computer chips work better, and so maybe it will decide to kill all humans.

And so they're listing a bunch of reasons like this, assigning some numbers to each of them, and then multiplying all of them at the end.