Max gives an example of what he considers a present AI failure: social media recommendation algorithms. He argues that these algos optimize engagement behaviour

Max gives an example of what he considers a present AI failure: social media recommendation algorithms. He argues that these algos optimize engagement behaviours by exposing users to content that makes them angry, confirms previous biases. It has been suggested that a lot of the culture wars in the West from the last decade are a direct result of social media recommendation models. You could imagine that given time and the right circumstances, these could lead to collapse of a nation, gradually or climatically through civil war. That is an example on non-agential AI causing systemic harm to humanity. Agential could cause more of the same, but in novel ways. There is also new potential for terroristic applications. And while no one event might be society breaking, the ability to scale up to many concurrent agents could be death by a thousand cuts. That is some short term stuff I can think of. Long term, it really depends on the capabilities of the AI. If a weak AI (not AGI) doesn't collapse our global civ, then I suspect an AGI would manipulate our communications and infrastructure to some purpose, which could create an environment increasingly less conducive to humans. I'm not sure how valuable it really is make specific claims of what exactly that might look like. The important part is the reasoning that an AGI's motives likely don't align with humans (unless we learn how to enforce alignment) and it will be very capable at manipulating the technology and humans (because we are essentially training it do be able to do these things).