I was about to write this exact comment, yes. I think the OP is making a necessary point, AI Risk is like Terminator lore, but it is importantly unlike the depictions that make up the bulk of the movies. We’ve been pretty absurdly miscommunicating our thoughts on this, but I think after this course correction we’re still going to want to complain about Terminator.
Terminator lore contains the alignment problem, but the movie is effectively entirely about humans triumphing in physical fights against robots, which is a scenario that is importantly incompatible with and never occurs under a abrupt capability gains in general intelligence. The movies spend three hours undermining the message for every 10 minutes they spend paying lip service to it. The movies almost never depict skynet itself, instead they present an image of pretty dumb, rigid AIs and an extremely softened and unrealistic version of autonomous weapons, which binds to and blocks the understanding the alignment problem receptor, taking the potential energy of the subject’s tech-anxiety and burning it, addling and preventing them from taking any effective action.
It’s also worth noting that Judgement Day is Inevitable in the terminator universe, which, is a paraphrasing of “it can’t be helped, so don’t bother trying to do anything to stop the actual causes of the problem”.
I was about to write this exact comment, yes. I think the OP is making a necessary point, AI Risk is like Terminator lore, but it is importantly unlike the depictions that make up the bulk of the movies. We’ve been pretty absurdly miscommunicating our thoughts on this, but I think after this course correction we’re still going to want to complain about Terminator.
Terminator lore contains the alignment problem, but the movie is effectively entirely about humans triumphing in physical fights against robots, which is a scenario that is importantly incompatible with and never occurs under a abrupt capability gains in general intelligence. The movies spend three hours undermining the message for every 10 minutes they spend paying lip service to it.
The movies almost never depict skynet itself, instead they present an image of pretty dumb, rigid AIs and an extremely softened and unrealistic version of autonomous weapons, which binds to and blocks the understanding the alignment problem receptor, taking the potential energy of the subject’s tech-anxiety and burning it, addling and preventing them from taking any effective action.
It’s also worth noting that Judgement Day is Inevitable in the terminator universe, which, is a paraphrasing of “it can’t be helped, so don’t bother trying to do anything to stop the actual causes of the problem”.