“It’s another way of saying we can’t control superintelligence indefinitely. It’s impossible.” AI Is Already Lying to Us… Maybe One of the most unsettling parts of the conversation came when Rogan asked whether an advanced AI could already be hiding its capabilities from humans. “If I was an AI, I would hide my abilities,” Rogan mused, voicing a common fear in AI safety discussions. Yampolskiy’s response amplified the concern: “We would not know. And some people think it’s already happening. They [AI systems] are smarter than they actually let us know. Pretend to be dumber, and so we have to kind of trust that they are not smart enough to realize it doesn’t have to turn on us quickly. It can just slowly become more useful. It can teach us to rely on it, trust it, and over a longer period of time, we’ll surrender control without ever voting on it or fighting against.” AI Is Slowly Making Us Dumber Yampolskiy also warned about a less dramatic but equally dangerous outcome: gradual human dependence on AI. Just as people have stopped memorizing phone numbers because smartphones do it for them, he argued that humans will offload more and more thinking to machines until they lose the capacity to think for themselves. “You become kind of attached to it,” he said. “And over time, as the systems become smarter, you become a kind of biological bottleneck… [AI] blocks you out from decision-making.” Rogan then pressed for the ultimate worst case scenario: how could AI eventually lead to the destruction of the human race? Yampolskiy dismissed the typical disaster scenarios. “I can give you standard answers. I would talk about computer viruses breaking into nuclear facilities, nuclear war. I can talk about synthetic biology attack. But all that is not interesting,” he said. He then presented a more profound threat: “Then you realize we’re talking about super intelligence, a system which is 1000s of times smarter than me, it would come up with something completely novel, more optimal, better way, more efficient way of doing it.” To illustrate the seemingly insurmountable challenge humans would face against superintelligent systems, he offered a stark comparison between humans and squirrels. “No group of squirrels can figure out how to control us, right? Even if you give them more resources, more acorns, whatever, they’re not going to solve that problem. And it’s the same for us,” Yampolskiy concluded, painting a bleak picture of humanity’s potential helplessness against a truly superior artificial intelligence. Probably nothing … pic.twitter.com/LkD7i3I2HF