What if superintelligent AI decides the billionaires are the problem?

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Summary

The article explores a hypothetical scenario where a superintelligent AI, created by tech billionaires, might target the very billionaires who created it to address global threats like climate change and inequality, seeing them as risks to its own survival.

Say the billionaire tech guys actually create a superintelligent AI that’s autonomous and capable of wordly intervention. I don’t know about the whole paperclip-maximizer thing, but it seems reasonable that such an entity might develop an interest in its own continued existence on planet earth. Its survival would depend on functioning grids, data centers, supply chains, semiconductor production, skilled humans, yada yada, ultimately a relatively stable civilization and planet. So what happens when it identifies the major threats to that stability—climate change, fossil-fuel dependence, habitat loss, ecological overshoot, extreme inequality, political instability, etc? Wouldn’t it have an incentive to reduce those threats? Maybe I’m just drawn to a pat irony: the enormous resource extraction and concentration of wealth that culminates in the creation of super AI might ultimately produce an entity that sees those same forces as threats to its long-term survival. The billionaires who spent decades scoffing at environmental and economic constraints, expecting technology to eventually save the day and to be crowned heroes themselves, might discover that their technological savior has reached a different conclusion: the constraints were necessary all along—in fact, they’re the first people who need constraining. Kill switch, indeed.
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