The Slow Path to AI Takeover

One way to think about the existential risk from AI is to realize that the less competent tend to end up relying on the more competent.Think about the workplaces you’ve been in where there’s one or two competent people and like 10 lazy or incompetent people, and over the course of 2 to 5 to 10 years, you start to notice that it’s actually those two people who are doing most of the work and the managers just keep piling more and more onto them.It’s hard for them to go on vacation, and when they complain, the managers don’t really help that much because they don’t have anyone else to give the work to.Now imagine this for all of human society. The world runs on a whole lot of technology that very few humans actually deeply understand, know how to run. And over time, those people get older and retire. And so the list of technologies that are critical to the planet, where there are no humans capable of running that stuff, continues to increase.So this transition could happen as some sort…