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I am trying to gather a list of answers/quotes from public figures to the following questions:

• What are the chances that AI will cause human extinction?
• Will AI automate most human labour?
• Should advanced AI models be open source?
• Do humans have a moral duty to build artificial superintelligence?
• Should there be international regulation of advanced AI?
• Will AI be used to make weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)?

I am writing them down here if you want to look/help: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HH1cpD48BqNUA1TYB2KYamJwxluwiAEG24wGM2yoLJw/edit?usp=sharing 

[Crossposted from Eukaryote Writes Blog.]

So you’ve heard about how fish aren’t a monophyletic group? You’ve heard about carcinization, the process by which ocean arthropods convergently evolve into crabs? You say you get it now? Sit down. Sit down. Shut up. Listen. You don’t know nothing yet.

“Trees” are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees. This means that, for instance, either:

• The common ancestor of a maple and a mulberry tree was not a tree.
• The common ancestor of a stinging nettle and a strawberry plant was a tree.
• And this is true for most trees or non-trees that you can think of.

I thought I had a pretty good guess at this, but the situation...

Suppose Alice and Bob are two Bayesian agents in the same environment. They both basically understand how their environment works, so they generally agree on predictions about any specific directly-observable thing in the world - e.g. whenever they try to operationalize a bet, they find that their odds are roughly the same. However, their two world models might have totally different internal structure, different “latent” structures which Alice and Bob model as generating the observable world around them. As a simple toy example: maybe Alice models a bunch of numbers as having been generated by independent rolls of the same biased die, and Bob models the same numbers using some big complicated neural net. 

Now suppose Alice goes poking around inside of her world model, and somewhere in there...

The European parliamentary election is currently taking place (voting period: 2024-04-07 to 2024-07-10). While I assume my vote^[1] has ~no impact on x-risk either way, I'd nonetheless like to take into account if parties have made public statements on AI. But I'm not sure they do. Does anyone know, or how to find out? 

I guess there's also the question of past legislative records on AI, which might be even more predictive of future behavior. There's the EU's AI Act, but I'm not sure what its current implementation status is, whether it's considered useful by AI x-risk folks, or what if any political parties have made any statements on it. I'm also not sure how to interpret the parties' parliamentary voting record on it.^[2]

1. ^{^}

   In case it matters, I'm from Germany, Bavaria.

2. ^{^}

   The roll-call vote results can be found here after clicking on "Artificial Intelligence Act". The 523/46/49 votes for the +/-/0 results are the votes in favor/against/abstained.