Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

From my perspective there’s very slow but very real progress happening in the AI space. I see people making wild predictions in both directions, but in terms of actual unsupervised utility there’s definitely progress abet wildly slower than most hype.

The rhetorical structure of talking about uncertain risks and then trying to concentrate the authority to manage those risks in their own hands sounds utterly ridiculous to ordinary people like me.

It's just a simple hypothesis that AI will become uncontrollable to humans once it becomes superintelligent.

Isn't the fact that a reinforcement learning agent improves itself in a specific domain completely different from it recursively improving its own code in a 'better' way? It's just a tool to create a justification for regulation and control using sci-fi fear.

The comparison between nuclear power plant risk and AI risk is also absurd. Where exactly can you define and measure the probability of AI exterminating humanity? It's as unquantifiable as 'I, human JDW64, will become a successful programmer.' What is the measurement standard? Why dress up AI researchers' concerns as objective probabilities? Is it because numbers make it look logical?

The current US-China relationship is in the middle of an AI arms race. The US is strengthening export controls to limit China's AI development, and China is building its own ecosystem. In this situation, I don't understand the idea of cooperating for the common safety of humanity. RAND is an organization that presupposes cooperation—isn't it just a well-written research proposal from an institution that wants to position itself for that role?

Isn't the claim that 'government must step in' ultimately about protecting their own interests? 'A strong government that will protect us' is an authoritarian government. If they were East Asian, they would understand that such regimes have always been used as tools for surveillance and control.

And I don't understand why Fermi's paradox is being brought up here. Why package a software problem as something that inevitably requires strong control? Whenever I see articles like this, I think about what 'intelligence' really means. This person would probably be called 'intelligent' by others. But no matter how I look at it, the holes in the argument are too obvious. It really makes me think that there are different tiers of intelligence.