Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no evidence that a runaway artificial intelligence is even plausible Really? There is a lot of theory behind why this is likely to happen and if you want a real example there is a similar existing scenario we can look at, which is how humans have gone through an exponential runaway explosion in capabilities in the last few hundred years because of being more intelligent than other species and being able to…
The theories all inevitably rely on assumptions that are essentially the equivalence of spherical cows in a frictionless universe. All evidence is that costs for intelligence likely scale superlinearly. Each increase in intelligence capability requires substantially more resources (Computing power, training data, electricity, hardware, time, etc). Being smart doesn’t just directly result in these becoming available w…
The only reason why currently it takes far, far more computing power is that we have no idea how to build effective intelligence, and we're taking lots of brute force shortcuts because we don't really understand how the emergent capabilities emerge as we just throw a bunch of matrix multiplication at huge data and hope for the best. Now if some artificial agent becomes powerful enough to understand how it works and is capable of improving that (and that's a BIG "if", I'm not saying that it's certain or even likely, but I am asserting that it's possible) then we have to assume that it might be capable of doing superhuman intelligence with a quite modest compute budget - e.g. something that can be rented on the cloud with a million dollars (for example, by getting a donation from a "benefactor" or getting some crypto through a single ransomware extortion case), which is certainly below the level which would draw attention. Perhaps it's unlikely, but it is plausible, and that is dangerous enough to be a risk worth considering even if it's unlikely.