Extinction Risks from AI: Invisible to Science?
Vojtech Kovarik Christian van Merwijk Ida Mattsson
In an effort to inform the discussion surrounding existential risks from AI,
we formulate Extinction-level Goodhart's Law as "Virtually any goal
specification, pursued to the extreme, will result in the extinction of
humanity", and we aim to understand which formal models are suitable for
investigating this hypothesis. Note that we remain agnostic as to whether
Extinction-level Goodhart's Law holds or not. As our key contribution, we
identify a set of conditions that are necessary for a model that aims to be
informative for evaluating specific arguments for Extinction-level Goodhart's
Law. Since each of the conditions seems to significantly contribute to the
complexity of the resulting model, formally evaluating the hypothesis might be
exceedingly difficult. This raises the possibility that whether the risk of
extinction from artificial intelligence is real or not, the underlying dynamics
might be invisible to current scientific methods.