Living with Alien Beings

I will talk about some of the risks of AI especially the risk that AI will take over. I will speculate on why the public is not more scared of this. In particular, I will address the crazy idea that LLMs are just stochastic parrots and the idea that AIs cannot have subjective experience or emotions or genuine desires.

 I will claim that most people have a completely wrong theory of what a subjective experience is, even though they can use the words to communicate successfully. To illustrate this point I will prove that most people have a deeply flawed theory of how the words “horizontal” and “vertical” actually work even though they use those words successfully in everyday life.

I will also describe a way of reframing the problem of how we can coexist with superintelligent AI.