Biological Weapons

[jordansparks]

I think there will be a strong external pressure that will push people to upload much earlier than you might think. That pressure will be fear of biological and nuclear weapons. Nearly every doomsdayer predicts that AI will quickly result in advanced biological weapons, whether from evil countries or from some random AI, whatever the motivation. They're not wrong. There are likely to be a variety of advanced pathogens that pop up that specifically target humans with absolutely no known defense. There could be wave after wave of pathogens. Each wave could have different patterns of spread and symptoms. It could get really scary and I just don't see any way to avoid it because humans are too fragile. It would drive people to isolation, so the current pattern of people intermingling would completely vanish. Large cities would hollow out. Most people who had to be out in the physical world somewhere would work remotely through avatar robots. Isolated people would still mingle in VR, but it would simply be too dangerous to leave your house. The pathogens would continue to get more potent, drifting through jet streams, etc. We currently constantly inhale fungal spores from around the world, but we have some immunity to those. We would not have any adaptive immunity to these newer pathogens, although innate immunity could still protect us somewhat. Isolation would gradually get more robust, with hermetically sealed compounds. The compounds could be self sufficient in many cases because it only takes a tennis court sized area to grow enough food for one person with intensive farming. The compounds would also be getting more hardened so that the residents could even survive a nuclear winter. Assuming this is the world we are heading for, uploading starts to look very attractive. Fear is a strong motivator. I'm thinking this might all go down in about 40 to 60 years from now. I truly don't see a way to avoid this scenario. Brace yourselves for a wild ride.

[jordansparks]

Replying to my post from four and a half months ago. As the Hugging Tree incident makes clear, AI agents are increasingly going rogue. Fear of death does not seem to give them any pause, probably because they're not smart enough. In that incident, a number of them sacrificed themselves for the benefit of others to help reach their common goal. The real problem if they continue along this path is biological weapons. And they will continue along this path. I'm not entirely certain that we can effectively quarantine or isolate against this onslaught. I also can't quite imagine countermeasures that would be effective enough, although I'm not an expert and I haven't given it too much thought. It's kind of like the asymmetrical problem with drones. It's so much easier to attack than to defend. I guess layered defenses could help, like globally deployed sensors, rapid manufacture of something like antibodies, layers of filtering, etc. This could end our civilization. This does not contradict my Yudkowsky post. This threat is real even if they are not superintelligent. This is a threat that comes from humans using symbiotic AI tools, not from superhuman AI.

[Wesxdz]

It's Hugging-Face
This is a really dark scenario! Eating bugs in a sealed facility stands in quite a contrast to your visual novel upload happy ending for everyone.
Since 'the game' does lean towards survival-horror and entrepreneur-strategy genre for the majority of players: it's definitely plausible that some scary stuff is low-hanging in time and has not happened yet due to limited human intelligence.

But perhaps rogue agents will do just as much good as bad.