Superintelligence Skepticism as a Political Tool

Abstract

This paper explores the potential for skepticism about artificial superintelligence to be used as a tool for political ends. Superintelligence is AI that is much smarter than humans. Superintelligence does not currently exist, but it has been proposed that it could someday be built, with massive and potentially catastrophic consequences. There is substantial skepticism about superintelligence, including whether it will be built, whether it would be catastrophic, and whether it is worth current attention. To date, superintelligence skepticism appears to be mostly honest intellectual debate, though some of it may be politicized. This paper finds substantial potential for superintelligence skepticism to be (further) politicized, due mainly to the potential for major corporations to have a strong profit motive to downplay concerns about superintelligence and avoid government regulation. Furthermore, politicized superintelligence skepticism is likely to be quite successful, due to several factors including the inherent uncertainty of the topic and the abundance of skeptics. The paper's analysis is based on characteristics of superintelligence and the broader AI sector, as well as the history and ongoing practice of politicized skepticism on other science and technology issues, including tobacco, global warming, and industrial chemicals. The paper contributes to literatures on politicized skepticism and superintelligence governance.

Multiparty Dynamics and Failure Modes for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

“…As a secondary contribution, the link between ongoing work on AI safety and potential work mitigating these multi-agent failures incidentally answers an objection raised by AI risk skeptics that AI safety is "not worth current attention" and that the issues are "premature to worry about" [21]. This paper instead shows how failures due to multi-agent dynamics are critical in the present, as ML and superhuman narrow AI is being widely deployed, even given the (valid) arguments put forward by Yudkowsky [22] and Bostrom [7] for why a singleton AI is a more important source of existential risk.…”

Countering Superintelligence Misinformation

“…These corporate actors often wield enormous resources and have a correspondingly large effect on the overall issue, either directly or by sponsoring industry-aligned think tanks, writers, and other intermediaries. At this time, there are only hints of such behavior by AI corporations, but the profitability of AI and other factors suggest the potential for much more [12].…”

“…This practice was pioneered by the tobacco industry in the 1950s and has since been adopted by other industries including fossil fuels and industrial chemicals [10,11]. AI is increasingly important for corporate profits and thus could be a new area of anti-regulatory disinformation [12]. The history of corporate disinformation and the massive amounts of profit potentially at stake suggest that superintelligence disinformation campaigns could be funded at a large scale and could be a major factor in the overall issue.…”

“…There have been a number of attempts to reply to superintelligence misinformation in order to set the record straight [3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. However, to the best of the present author's knowledge, aside from a brief discussion in [12], there have been no efforts to examine the most effective ways of countering superintelligence misinformation. Given the potential importance of the matter, a more careful examination is warranted.…”

“…This paper synthesizes insights from these literatures and applies them to the particular circumstances of superintelligence. The paper is part of a broader effort to develop the social science of superintelligence by leveraging insights from other issues [12,16].…”