So many arguments along these lines run afoul of a very simple rule: You can't make predictions about the future by playing word games! An AI system can only b

So many arguments along these lines run afoul of a very simple rule: You can't make predictions about the future by playing word games! An AI system can only be dangerous or not dangerous based on what physical events happen in the real world, as a result of that AI interacting with the world via known physical laws. In order to decide whether a system is or isn't dangerous you need to have a predictive model of what that system will actually do in various hypothetical situations. You can't just say "because it is improperly defined as X it cannot do Y". If you want to predict what happens when you put too much plutonium into a small volume, you can't make any progress on this problem by talking about whether the device is truly a "bomb", or by saying that the whole question is just a rehash of the promethean myth, or that you cannot measure explosions on a single axis. The only thing that will do is to have a reliable model of the behavior of the system. Many people seem to either not understand, or intentionally obfuscate, that an AI, like a bomb, is also a physical system which interacts with the physical world. Marc Andreessen makes this error when he says AI is "just math" and therefore AIs are inherently safe. No, it's not just math, it's a computer, made of matter, that physically interacts with both human brains and other computer systems, and therefore by extension with the entire rest of the physical world. Now of course, the way that an AI interacts with the world is radically different than the way a bomb interacts with the world, and we cannot usefully model the behavior of the AI with nuclear physics, but the fact remains. (See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBfRG5GSnhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBfRG5GSnhE) So when you see arguments like this, ask: Is the person making an argument based on a model, or not? Examples of model based arguments include things like: - "AI risk is not a concern because of computational intractability" - we understand something about the limits of computation, and possibly those limits might constrain what AIs can do. - "AI risk is a concern because less intelligent entities are not usually able to constrain the behavior of more intelligent entities" - A coarse and imperfect model indeed, but certainly a model based on observations of interactions in the real world. "Verbal Trick" arguments include things like: - "AI risk is not a concern because we can't even define intelligence" - "AI is just math" - "AI risk is not a concern because intelligence is multi-dimensional" A third category to watch out for is the misapplied model: - "AI risk is not a concern because people have always been worried about the apocalypse" - this is a model based argument, but it can only answer the question of why people are worried, it cannot answer the question of whether there is in fact something to be worried about.