Summary: Why an Air Force colonel — and many other experts — are so worried about the existential risk of AI

On Friday morning, Hamilton told RAS that he was actually describing a hypothetical thought experiment, saying, “We’ve never run that experiment, nor would we need to in order to realize that this is a plausible outcome.” He added, “Despite this being a hypothetical example, this illustrates the real-world challenges posed by AI-powered capability and is why the Air Force is committed to the ethical development of AI.”

The rise of AI fear

As AI systems get more powerful, the fact it’s often hard to get them to do precisely what we want them to do risks going from a fun eccentricity to a very scary problem.

(After Hamilton clarified his initial comments about AI simulations, Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek released a statement to Insider that the Air Force “has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations and remains committed to ethical and responsible use of AI technology.”)

Personally, my takeaway from this story was more like, let’s stop deploying more powerful AI systems, and avoid giving them more ability to take massively destructive actions in the real world, until we have a very clear conception of how we’ll know they are safe.

“Even if we knew how to build safe superintelligent AIs,” he writes.

Col. Hamilton had the takeaway that “you can’t have a conversation about artificial intelligence, intelligence, machine learning, autonomy if you’re not going to talk about ethics and AI.” Yet concerns like this haven’t stopped the Pentagon from going ahead with artificial intelligence research and deployment, including autonomous weapons.

Welcome to the resistance

Here at Future Perfect, of course, we’ve been arguing that AI poses a genuine risk of human extinction since back in 2018.

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Why an Air Force colonel — and many other experts — are so worried about the existential risk of AI

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