Dang, you changed your comment between starting my reply and sending it. For context it was originally asking whether I thought the current path and model of AI

Dang, you changed your comment between starting my reply and sending it. For context it was originally asking whether I thought the current path and model of AI development had a small chance of causing a catastrophe down the line, or something like that. I don’t know how to answer that question because I only care what AI development looks like now and what’s possible in the practically foreseeable future, which I don’t think will cause a large catastrophe at all. I don’t think deep learning, transformer models, GAN, gradient boosted decision trees, or minimax with alpha-beta pruning will cause catastrophes. I don’t wring my hands about a completely uninvented and hypothetical future development until it’s no longer hypothetical, by which I don’t mean once it’s already causing problems, but once it’s actually something people are working on and trying to do. Since nothing even resembles that now, it wouldn’t be productive to worry about, because there’s no way of knowing what the threat model is or how to address it - it’s reasonable to consider Ebola becoming as transmissible as the cold, it’s unproductive worrying about silicon-based aliens invading Earth and forcing us to become their pets. I think the issue is people assume AI researchers and engineers are sitting in dark labs not talking to each other, when there’s actually a lot of communication and development you can follow. It’s not people coming out of nowhere with radically different approaches and shipping it by themselves, it’s highly iterative and collaborative. Even if it did happen, which it never does, there’s be no way to stop that individual person without creating a dystopian panopticon, since it’s basically terrorism. You can be sure that if the actual people working on AI get worried about something they’ll get the word out because they do think about potential nefarious applications - it happened years back with deepfakes for example.