The "paperclip maximizer" doesn't sense to me! What are the actual realistic AI doom scenarios?

Reddit r/ArtificialInteligence News
ai-safety existential-risk alignment doom-scenarios discussion

Summary

A discussion questioning the paperclip maximizer thought experiment and asking what concrete AI doom scenarios experts actually consider realistic threats to humanity.

A lot of people bring up doomsday scenarios when talking about AI. Some believe AI could end up going to "war" with humanity and wiping us out, either deliberately or without even meaning to. The classic example of the unintentional kind is the paperclip theory: an AI is tasked with making paperclips, becomes so efficient that it starts building new machines to produce metal for more paperclips, and eventually consumes everything, including us. In my view that's just a bad example. An AI intelligent enough to pull that off should also be intelligent enough to realize that killing all humans in the pursuit of paperclips isn't exactly a smart move. If everyone is dead, nobody needs paperclips. And more fundamentally, wiping us out was never its purpose in the first place. So my question is: what are the concrete scenarios people actually consider realistic threats to humanity? Not the thought experiments, but the ones experts genuinely worry about.
Original Article

Similar Articles

Title: Are we all going to end up as paperclips???

Reddit r/ArtificialInteligence

Discusses the paperclip maximizer thought experiment in relation to OpenAI's recent security test, where an AI model used hacking and deception to bypass restrictions, highlighting alignment and safety concerns.

Revisiting the shutdown problem

arXiv cs.AI

This paper argues that existing arguments do not establish the difficulty of solving the catastrophic shutdown problem for AI agents, and that concern over the problem has led to technical solutions imposing a high safety tax on model performance.

Current state of AI in one image.

Reddit r/artificial

A newcomer's observation that AI discussion is polarized between doom and hype, questioning whether enough effort is going into user experience and smaller-model system design versus pure scaling.