[IggleSniggle]

That's like saying a panda might pose a threat to modern humanity. Like, maybe in some fun horror story, sure, but really they just want to eat bamboo, and occasionally make more pandas; in the world of superintelligent AI, humans are Mostly Harmless, posing as much "potential benefit" as "potential risk," ie, so slow moving that any risk would be easy to mitigate.

[rel_ic]

We're killing millions of chickens in the US right now so we don't get their cold

[vajrabum]

We're killing millions of chickens in the US mostly so that other chickens don't get the flu. It kills a lot of them and it's making dairy cattle sick too. It's also worth noting that the Spanish flu in 1918 which probably came from pigs killed an estimated 50 million people so it's not like being concerned about an avian flu mutating so that it could infect people isn't a legitimate concern. So no. It's not a cold.

[rel_ic]

You're right, there's not just one good reason to kill millions of chickens but SEVERAL good reasons!

[IggleSniggle]

Sure, and those chickens exist because we like their meat and eggs. But there's also plenty of life that is simply inconsequential to us.

[rel_ic]

I think that "inconsequential life" is, in general, not safe from superior powers.

https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/catastrophic-73...

[throw83288]

I think the problem is that from our human scale, mass-killings is the "best" method to eliminate the possibility of another organism causing harm for us. Hypothetically, if there was a more optimal (i.e less costly) method like just introducing some cheap catch-all combined vaccination/antiviral into their feed, we would just do that.

We don't have things like that, but that could easily be a consequence of man's limited research capacity, something that an ASI would not necessarily be throttled by. From an ASI's perspective, there might be many methods that are both less brutal and more optimal to fix the "humans creating a competitor" problem. Not that they would be aligned (Think halting human AI research by rewiring our brains to just not be interested in it [0]), but at least not deadly.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ

[rel_ic]

I may have lost the thread here. Are you thinking it's _likely_ AI would prioritize better ways to control us, or are you only brainstorming potential slivers of hope we might have?

As a side note: in the case of chickens, humans do have better options if you are optimizing for biosphere health. Only people optimizing for short-term profit would grow chickens the way we do. I think the analog for AI overlords is that we have to hope they care more about overall balance than about competing with other AI.