Elon Musk says ‘digital superintelligence’ could exist in 5–6 years

I mean technically he's not wrong - "never" divided by two is also "never"

TL/DR - artificial super-intelligence - as it has been apparently created in the real world of us, not scifi - for itself is more than enough a risk.

But no one knows how risky they are. Most are betting that isn't a that much dangerous thing, so let's go forward.

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What we don't actually know for sure, is related to consciusness. You can't tell precisely if the advanced LLMs - or even some of not that bigger, opensource still big ones - have some level of consciousness, or high levels of it.

We can't be sure because we still have not a concise definition of consciusness, and it is currently investigated if many animals could actually be as conscius as we are (but not that chatty so to answer us when we try to make a conversation with them),

but the actual problem with LLMs (and state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies), is that they are interacting with us, they - if they're conscius - would know deeply the human world, and - the frightening thing for many AI specialist - if they want and/or need, could be influencing the human world,

How they could be influencing us / everything? just by chatting with humans everywhere, this is valid even inside the most secured environments, the "air-gapped" models belonging to FAANG and other powerful actors (nation-state probably): If you change the opinion of a human inside a FAANG, you're influencing the human world.

The level of consciusness is of high importance because even starting with 0 consciusness, the sheer astounding intelligence of the LLMs could be influencing humans out of any intention (good or bad). Starting from the baseline of the LLMs having no consciusness at all, we have quite a lot potential issues (bad ones), for the global human society. No, not even at a long term. The stuff could already be affecting us right now (lets say, the Holywood problems right now).

From that - quite feasible - starting point, if the LLMs would have some higher level of consciusness, we - all humans in the world - would be in a brave new world scenario, actually uncharted territory.