…even if we stopped at today’s AI technology and simply collected more data, built more sensors, and added more computing capacity, extreme systemic risks could emerge, including:
1) Mass labor displacement, unemployment, and inequality; 2)The rise of a more oligopolistic global market structure, potentially moving us away from our liberal economic world order; 3)Imagery intelligence and other mechanisms for revealing most of the ballistic missile-carrying submarines that countries rely on to be able to respond to nuclear attack; 4)Ubiquitous sensors and algorithms that can identify individuals through face recognition, leading to universal surveillance; 5)Autonomous weapons with an independent chain of command, making it easier for authoritarian regimes to violently suppress their citizens.
This is one of those things that isn’t intuitive but at the same time is obviously true. Even if all we do going forward is improve what we already have (e.g. cheaper, faster, more powerful computation, sensors, etc.) we could brute force our way to a vastly different society. It’s easy to make fun of all the ways that self-driving cars, natual language processing, and recommendation systems aren’t as good as humans. But think about the fact that we have self-driving cars, NLP and recommendation systems. These things may not be perfect today but they didn’t exist 10 years ago. In a decade we’ve gone from, “This is impossible”, to “This isn’t perfect”. Unless technological development comes to a complete standstill (note: this would require some kind of apocalyptic event), machine learning by itself will transform society using nothing more advanced than larger data sets and more powerful computation.