In a $30 million mansion perched on a cliff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, a gaggle of AI researchers, philosophers, and technologists gathered to debate the tip of humanity.
The Sunday afternoon symposium, referred to as “Worthy Successor,” revolved round a provocative thought from entrepreneur Daniel Faggella: The “ethical goal” of superior AI ought to be to create a type of intelligence so highly effective and smart that “you’d gladly favor that it (not humanity) decide the longer term path of life itself.”
Faggella made the theme clear in his invitation. “This occasion could be very a lot centered on posthuman transition,” he wrote to me through X DMs. “Not on AGI that eternally serves as a device for humanity.”
A celebration full of futuristic fantasies, the place attendees talk about the tip of humanity as a logistics downside somewhat than a metaphorical one, might be described as area of interest. In case you reside in San Francisco and work in AI, then it is a typical Sunday.
About 100 company nursed nonalcoholic cocktails and nibbled on cheese plates close to floor-to-ceiling home windows dealing with the Pacific ocean earlier than gathering to listen to three talks on the way forward for intelligence. One attendee sported a shirt that stated “Kurzweil was proper,” seemingly a reference to Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who predicted machines will surpass human intelligence within the coming years. One other wore a shirt that stated “does this assist us get to protected AGI?” accompanied by a considering face emoji.
Faggella informed WIRED that he threw this occasion as a result of “the large labs, the folks that know that AGI is prone to finish humanity, do not discuss it as a result of the incentives do not allow it” and referenced early feedback from tech leaders like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis, who “had been all fairly frank about the opportunity of AGI killing us all.” Now that the incentives are to compete, he says, “they’re all racing full bore to construct it.” (To be honest, Musk nonetheless talks concerning the dangers related to superior AI, although this hasn’t stopped him from racing forward).
On LinkedIn, Faggella boasted a star-studded visitor checklist, with AI founders, researchers from all the highest Western AI labs, and “a lot of the vital philosophical thinkers on AGI.”
The primary speaker, Ginevera Davis, a author based mostly in New York, warned that human values is perhaps not possible to translate to AI. Machines might by no means perceive what it’s wish to be acutely aware, she stated, and attempting to hard-code human preferences into future techniques could also be shortsighted. As an alternative, she proposed a lofty-sounding thought referred to as “cosmic alignment”—constructing AI that may hunt down deeper, extra common values we haven’t but found. Her slides usually confirmed a seemingly AI-generated picture of a techno-utopia, with a gaggle of people gathered on a grass knoll overlooking a futuristic metropolis within the distance.
Critics of machine consciousness will say that giant language fashions are merely stochastic parrots—a metaphor coined by a gaggle of researchers, a few of whom labored at Google, who wrote in a well-known paper that LLMs don’t truly perceive language and are solely probabilistic machines. However that debate wasn’t a part of the symposium, the place audio system took as a given the concept superintelligence is coming, and quick.
