ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY, A 44-YEAR-OLD academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience - taking things slowly for a novice like me - that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. "The difficulty is, people do not realise," Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour's leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. "We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives."
It's January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other Al-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky's theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: "Oh fuuuuu-!"
This story is from the February 23, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the February 23, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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