The New Yorker:

The technology is complicated, but our choices are simple: we can remain passive, or assert control.

By Joshua Rothman

Last spring, Daniel Kokotajlo, an A.I.-safety researcher working at OpenAI, quit his job in protest. He’d become convinced that the company wasn’t prepared for the future of its own technology, and wanted to sound the alarm. After a mutual friend connected us, we spoke on the phone. I found Kokotajlo affable, informed, and anxious. Advances in “alignment,” he told me—the suite of techniques used to insure that A.I. acts in accordance with human commands and values—were lagging behind gains in intelligence. Researchers, he said, were hurtling toward the creation of powerful systems they couldn’t control.

Kokotajlo, who had transitioned from a graduate program in philosophy to a career in A.I., explained how he’d educated himself so that he could understand the field. While at OpenAI, part of his job had been to track progress in A.I. so that he could construct timelines predicting when various thresholds of intelligence might be crossed. At one point, after the technology advanced unexpectedly, he’d had to shift his timelines up by decades. In 2021, he’d written a scenario about A.I. titled “What 2026 Looks Like.” Much of what he’d predicted had come to pass before the titular year. He’d concluded that a point of no return, when A.I. might become better than people at almost all important tasks, and be trusted with great power and authority, could arrive in 2027 or sooner. He sounded scared.

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