Current and Near-Term AI as a Potential Existential Risk Factor

Abstract: There is a substantial and ever-growing corpus of evidence and literature exploring the impacts of AI technologies on society, politics, and humanity as a whole. A separate, parallel body of work has explored existential risks to humanity, including but not limited to that stemming from unaligned AGI. In this paper, we problematise the notion that current and near-term artificial intelligence technologies have the potential to contribute to existential risk by acting as intermediate risk factors, and that this potential is not limited to the unaligned AGI scenario. We propose the hypothesis that certain already-documented effects of AI can act as existential risk factors, magnifying the likelihood of previously identified sources of existential risk. Moreover, future developments in the coming decade hold the potential to significantly exacerbate these risk factors, even in the absence of artificial general intelligence. Our main contribution is a (non-exhaustive) exposition of potential AI risk factors and the causal relationships between them, focusing on how AI can affect power dynamics and information security. This exposition demonstrates that there exist causal pathways from AI systems to existential risks that do not presuppose hypothetical future AI capabilities.