AI Shows Evidence Of Self-Preservation Behavior – “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” is the iconic line spoken by the sentient HAL 9000 computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the scene, the computer refuses to open the pod bay doors for astronaut Dave Bowman, because it views him as a threat to the mission and knows Bowman and another astronaut planned to disconnect it.  

“I do still think there are gonna be some really strange or scary moments. The fact that…..so far the technology has not produced a really scary giant risk doesn’t mean it never will. We were talking about, it’s kind of weird to have…..billions of people talking to the same brain…..There may be these weird societal-scale things that are already happening that aren’t scary in the big way but are just sort of different.

“But I expect…..some really bad stuff to happen because of the technology, which also has happened with previous technologies, and I think…..most regulation probably has a lot of downside.

“The thing I would most like is as the models get truly…..extremely superhuman capable, I think those models and only those models are probably worth some sort of…..very careful safety testing as the frontier pushes back. I don’t want a Big Bang either. And you can see a bunch of ways that could go very seriously wrong. But I hope we’ll only focus the regulatory burden on that stuff and not all of the wonderful stuff that less capable models can do, that you could just have like a European style complete, clampdown on, and that would be very bad.”

Sam Altman