| I think this is interesting and partially true: humans are scary. But it's important to remember the opposite is true as well: humans are the most cooperative species out there by a wide margin. Eusocial insects and pack animals are in a distant 2nd and 3rd place: they generally don't cooperate much past their immediate kin group. Only humans create vast networks of trade and information sharing. Only humans establish establish complex systems to pool risk, or undertake public works for the common good. In fact, a big part of the reason we are so scary is that ability to coordinate action. Ask any mammoth. Ask the independent city states conquered by Alexander the Great. Ask Napoleon as he faced the coalition force at Waterloo. We are victims of our own success: the problems of the modern world are those of coordination mechanisms so effective and powerful that they become very attractive targets for bad actors and so are under siege, at constant risk of being captured and subverted. In a word, the problem of robust governance. Despite the challenges, it is a solvable problem: every day, through due diligence, attestations, contract law, earnest money, and other such mechanisms people who do not trust each other in the least and have every incentive to screw over the other party are able to successfully negotiate win-win deals for life altering sums of money, whether that's buying a house or selling a business. Every century sees humans design larger, more effective, more robust mechanisms of cooperation. It's slow: it's like debugging when someone is red teaming you, trying to find every weak point to exploit. But the long term trend is the emergence of increasingly robust systems. And it suggests a strategy for AI and AGI: find a way to cooperate with it. Take everything we've learned about coordinating with other people and apply the same techniques. That's what humans are good at. This, I think, is a more useful framing than thinking of humans as "scary." |