There are many people, including many experts in the field of AI, that say AI could possibly be an existential threat that could ultimately lead to the extinction of humanity. I've heard this over and over again, and there are countless articles about it. Even Chat GPT will talk to you about it. But what I never hear any of these people talk about is exactly how this could happen.
Yes, I've seen Terminator. If we hook our super-intellegent AI up to our nuclear weapons, i can obviously see how that could lead to human extinction. But is that really what these people are talking about? I can't imagine a country doing this without being 100000% sure they knew what they were doing. And these systems are air-gapped right? So it's not like an AI with internet access could "find its way in", and start launching nukes, right?
Outside of that, how could an AI cause our extinction? Do they mean causing wars through the spread of misinformation? Do they mean completely shutting down all of our infrastructure? These would both be devastating, but they wouldn't be extinction level events. And couldn't we just hit the kill-switch if it started shutting everything down?
I mean, ultimately, AI is a thing in a box. It has no arms, no legs, no eyes, no way of interacting with the outside environment other than sending electrion signals. What signals could it send out that would cause the extinction of humanity?
Even in Terminator, the human race didn't go extinct. If the AI detonated so many nukes that the destruction caused the extinction of humanity, the devastation would be bad enough that the AI wouldn't be able to survive very long either.
What is the actual mechanism of extinction? Everybody wants to talk about the threat, but i haven't heard anybody talk about a real-life scenerio.
