Why Do AI Labs Keep Building If AGI Is Dangerous?

Kevin Roose says he asked some version of this of the about 150 people he interviewed for The AGI Chronicles: if it is so dangerous, why are you doing it? The answers usually opened with inevitability. Someone is going to build this. The recipe is not that hard. Compute, data, and the right algorithms, and you get AGI. If it is possible, it will happen, and better that it be them than people they trust less. He calls that the harm-reduction argument.

Then come the true believers. If they can build it without blowing up humanity, wrecking the internet, or developing novel bioweapons, technology has usually been a force for good. Few people, he says, would trade lives with their great-great-grandparents. Subsistence farming was grim, and some researchers think people today are in that position, and that the world on the other side is one they will want.

A third group is simpler. It is fun to make the neural networks code, so that is what they will keep doing. Roose is reporting what he heard. He is not saying the risk is settled.