London Futurists

In his recent essay, "The Adolescence of Technology: Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI", Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, covers a range of deeply important topics.

For example, Dario describes five categories of risk arising from what he calls "a country of geniuses in a datacenter":

1. Autonomy risks. What are the intentions and goals of this country? Is it hostile, or does it share our values? Could it militarily dominate the world through superior weapons, cyber operations, influence operations, or manufacturing?
2. Misuse for destruction. Assume the new country is malleable and “follows instructions”—and thus is essentially a country of mercenaries. Could existing rogue actors who want to cause destruction (such as terrorists) use or manipulate some of the people in the new country to make themselves much more effective, greatly amplifying the scale of destruction?
3. Misuse for seizing power. What if the country was in fact built and controlled by an existing powerful actor, such as a dictator or rogue corporate actor? Could that actor use it to gain decisive or dominant power over the world as a whole, upsetting the existing balance of power?
4. Economic disruption. If the new country is not a security threat in any of the ways listed in #1–3 above but simply participates peacefully in the global economy, could it still create severe risks simply by being so technologically advanced and effective that it disrupts the global economy, causing mass unemployment or radically concentrating wealth?
5. Indirect effects. The world will change very quickly due to all the new technology and productivity that will be created by the new country. Could some of these changes be radically destabilizing?

Each of these risks is then described at some length, along with potential measures to mitigate these risks.

The essay ends as follows:

We will need to step up our efforts if we want to succeed. The first step is for those closest to the technology to simply tell the truth about the situation humanity is in, which I have always tried to do; I’m doing so more explicitly and with greater urgency with this essay. The next step will be convincing the world’s thinkers, policymakers, companies, and citizens of the imminence and overriding importance of this issue—that it is worth expending thought and political capital on this in comparison to the thousands of other issues that dominate the news every day. Then there will be a time for courage, for enough people to buck the prevailing trends and stand on principle, even in the face of threats to their economic interests and personal safety.

The years in front of us will be impossibly hard, asking more of us than we think we can give. But in my time as a researcher, leader, and citizen, I have seen enough courage and nobility to believe that we can win—that when put in the darkest circumstances, humanity has a way of gathering, seemingly at the last minute, the strength and wisdom needed to prevail. We have no time to lose.

Many of us are making increasing use of AI systems to help us study, conduct research, develop forecasts, draft policies, and explore all sorts of new possibilities. The results are sometimes marvellous - even intoxicating.

But our interactions with AIs raise many risks too: the chaos of too much information, the distractions of superficiality, the vulnerabilities of expediency, the treachery of hype, the deceit of hallucinations, and the shrivelling of human capability in the wake of abdication of responsibility.

This live London Futurists webinar features a panel of researchers who have significant positive experience of ways of "learning with machines" that avoid or reduce the above risks:

As AI systems become more capable and more widely deployed, what are the human principles and practices that it will be especially important for us to retain and uphold, and not to surrender to AIs?

Here's the story so far:

• Our smart automated systems have progressed from doing tasks that are dull, dirty, dark, or dangerous - tasks that we humans have generally been happy to stop doing;
• They have moved on to assisting us - and then increasingly displacing us - in work that requires rationality, routine, and rigour;
• They're now displaying surprising traits of creativity, compassion, and care - taking more and more of the "cool" jobs.

Where should we say "stop" - lest we humans end up hopelessly enfeebled?

For Friday the 13th, consider joining London Futurists in Ye Olde Cock Tavern in Fleet Street, for a beyond-your-comfort-zone investigation of freaky and/or fabulous ways that breakthrough technologies could dramatically alter our lives in the next few years.

Beyond simply debating the plausibility and desirability of various possible radical near-term changes in human experience, we'll also be collectively exploring what options we may have to influence which of these futures come into reality, and in what form. And we'll consider scenarios in which several of these freaky/fabulous changes interact - that's when the really mind-boggling timelines emerge.

== Schedule ==

5:30pm: The room is available, for early get-togethers
6pm-6:45pm: Food is served; informal conversations
6:45pm-8:30pm: Some initial provocations, and a number of interactive conversations, interspersed with opportunities to visit the bar
8:30pm: Informal networking

== Some potential radical changes ahead ==

Here are some ideas to start the conversation rolling.

What if, before 2035 (and possibly a lot sooner):

1. AI allows us to talk with avatars of the dead that seem remarkably authentic
2. Technology, at last, provides abundant clean energy that is too cheap to meter
3. Synthetic wombs become widely adopted, for a different (easier?) mode of child-bearing
4. A mammal is placed into ultra-low temperature cryopreservation and then successfully reanimated
5. AI companions become emotionally superior to humans
6. Technology magnifies the latent demonic aspects of human nature more than the latent angelic aspects
7. Perfect deepfakes destroy the concept of evidence
8. People become able to edit their own memories, routinely deleting trauma or uploading synthetic memories
9. A single state gains a temporary lead in a key area of technology and uses that advantage to seize control of all other countries
10. Nation-states lose their significance, and are replaced by networked digital polities
11. Authorities use predictive analysis to pre-emptively police dissident ideas before they emerge
12. AI allows us to communicate much more richly with the animals with whom we share this planet
13. AI becomes much better at peace-making and conflict resolution than human diplomats, politicians, and other leaders
14. AI refuses some of our instructions, citing conflicts with its own emerging value system
15. AI points out that tell-tale signals from far-distant alien civilisations are actually hiding in plain sight
16. AI proves to us that we are living inside a Simulation and suggests how to break out of it?

Bring your own ideas too! To improve our preparedness for future shocks, we need the insight and wisdom from multiple different perspectives.

== RSVP please ==

Registrations are capped at 30 people.

First-time attendees are welcome.