Misalignment likely turns catastrophic before most other destructive technologies

From the conversation

But just for the audience there’s some way to configure $50,000 and a teenager’s time to destroy a civilization. If that thing is available, then misuses itself a teal risk, right? So do you think that that prospect is less likely than a way you could put it? Is there’s, like, a bunch of potential destructive technologies? And alignment is about AI itself being such a destructive technology, where even if the world just uses the technology of today, simply access to AI could cause human civilization to have serious problems. But there’s also just a bunch of other potential destructive technologies. Again, we mentioned like physical explosives or bioweapons of various kinds, and then the whole tale of who knows what. My guess is that Alignment becomes a catastrophic issue prior to most of these. That is, like, prior to some way to spend $50,000 to kill everyone, with the salient exception of possibly, like, bioweapons. So that would be my guess. And then there’s a question of what is your risk management approach? Not knowing what’s going on here, and you don’t understand whether there’s some way to use $50,000. But I think you can do things like understand how good is an AI at coming up with such schemes. Like, you can talk to your AI. Be like, does it produce new ideas for destruction we haven’t recognized? Yeah. Not whether we can evaluate it, but whether if such a thing exists.…