Thank you for the clarification regarding ASI. That still leaves the question of the definition of “safe ASI”; a key point that is emphasized in their manifesto.
To use your example it’s like an early mass market car industry professional (say in 1890) discussing road safety and ethical dilemmas in roads dominated by regular drivers and a large share of L4/L5 cars (with some of them being used as part-time taxis). I just don’t buy it.
Mind you I am not anti-ML/AI. I am an avid user of “AI” (ML?) upscaling (specifically video) and to lesser extent stable diffusion. While AI video upscaling is very fiddly and good results can be hard to get right, it is clearly on another level with respect to quality compared to “classical” upscaling algorithms. I was truly impressed when I was able to run by own SD upscale with good results.
What I am opposed to is oligarchs, oligarch-wanabees, shallow sounding proclamations of grandiose this or that. As far as I am concerned it’s all bullshit and they are all to one degree or another soulless ghouls that will eat your children alive for the right price and the correct mental excuse model (I am only partially exaggerating, happy to clarify if needed) .
If one has all these grand plans for safe ASI, concern for humanity and whatnot, setup a public repo and release all your code under GPL (and all relevant documentation, patent indemnification, no trademark tricks etc.). Considering Sutskever’s status as AI royalty who is also allegedly concerned about humanity, he would be the ideal person to pull this off.
If you can’t do that, then chances are you’re lying about your true motives. It’s really as simple as that.