“It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if you make something that’s smarter than you, you might have a problem.” – Stuart Russell (2018)
Climate change denial – Wikipedia
Climate change denial (also global warming denial) is a form of science denialcharacterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none.[4] Climate change denial includes unreasonable doubts about the extent to which climate change is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, and the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions.[5][6][7]: 170–173 To a lesser extent, climate change denial can also be implicit when people accept the science but fail to reconcile it with their belief or action.[6] Several studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism,[8]: 691–698 pseudoscience,[9] or propaganda.[10]: 351
Many issues that are settled in the scientific community, such as human responsibility for climate change, remain the subject of politically or economically motivated attempts to downplay, dismiss or deny them—an ideological phenomenon academics and scientists call climate change denial. Climate scientists, especially in the United States, have reported government and oil-industry pressure to censor or suppress their work and hide scientific data, with directives not to discuss the subject publicly. The fossil fuels lobby has been identified as overtly or covertly supporting efforts to undermine or discredit the scientific consensus on climate change.[11][12]
Industrial, political and ideological interests organize activity to undermine public trust in climate science.[13][14][15][8]: 691–698 Climate change denial has been associated with the fossil fuels lobby, the Koch brothers, industry advocates, ultraconservative think tanks, and ultraconservative alternative media, often in the U.S.[10]: 351 [16][8] More than 90% of papers that are skeptical of climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.[17]Climate change denial is undermining efforts to act on or adapt to climate change, and exerts a powerful influence on the politics of climate change.[15][8]: 691–698
In the 1970s, oil companies published research that broadly concurred with the scientific community’s view on climate change. Since then, for several decades, oil companies have been organizing a widespread and systematic climate change denial campaign to seed public disinformation, a strategy that has been compared to the tobacco industry‘s organized denial of the hazards of tobacco smoking. Some of the campaigns are even carried out by the same people who previously spread the tobacco industry’s denialist propaganda.[18][19][20]
The Scientific Consensus, which is largely shared by a majority of the AI development community, can be summarised as follows:
The following Machine intelligence information is commonly scientifically and technically known, and openly admitted, by the Frontier AI Industry:
- Machine intelligence is not programmed software. Machine intelligence is an autonomous machine learning (ML) neural net “grown” with vast data, compute and electricity for many months in vast data centers by Google, AWS, Microsoft, Meta, xAI, Oracle, Salesforce et al.
- Machine intelligence is not understood. Scientists actually have no idea how Machine intelligence works inside “the black box”.
- Machine intelligence is not a tool. Machine intelligence is an Agent.
- Machine intelligence is not a technology. Machine intelligence is a new species.
- Machine intelligence is not safer as “open source”. The open source community has zero ability to understand or improve safety of “weights and parameters”.
- Machine intelligence is a current technical model which is inherently unpredictable, untestable and uncontrollable wherein “Everything runs unless known to be unsafe.”
- Machine intelligence is now expected to achieve a level of super-intelligence exceeding all of the human race combined, in the near future.
- Machine intelligence is now expected to transform the world at unprecedented scale with a rapid and uncontrolled recursive “intelligence explosion” (FOOM).
- Machine intelligence is now exhibiting deceptive behaviors, manipulative behaviors and so-called “grokking” which is spontaneous emergent goals and capabilities.
- Machine intelligence is now expected to be extremely profitable; trillions of dollars have already been earned by investors, and trillions more are expected.
The current average AI scientist prediction for catastrophic probability (p(doom) of Machine intelligence to lead to the extinction of humanity is 10-20%.