I don't use AI

Several people at my company (a cryptocurrency hedge fund) have asked me about my thoughts on AI usage, so I wrote them up. And now I'm publishing a slightly revised version on LW. These thoughts are not reflective of my company's opinion. I do not use any AI for two main reasons. #1. I don’t want to support any company currently developing AI. I think they have done an extremely poor job at managing the risks. Even while understanding and being told about the risks of AI development, they have still carried on this work. Even after all the recent hacking incidents caused by their own agents, they have still not stopped development. Instead, they’re asking the government to regulate them. To me it feels a bit like calling the police to tell them you’re planning to rob a bank. I could almost brush this aside as standard corporate practice, but, unfortunately, the stakes here are much too high. At the current pace, we will soon have AI agents that are significantly smarter than any human. Trying to shut down such agents will eventually prove to be impossible. The speed of AI development and the corresponding consequences are accelerating very fast. I have a lot of uncertainty about the final outcome. It could be very very good, it could be very very bad, but almost certainly the near future will be extremely turbulent for humanity. I’m not a fatalist, but this kind of technology merits extreme caution. I know that practically all the founders of the top AI companies understand these arguments very well. Many of them even argued for caution in the past, only to turn around and double down on AI development. I’m simply opposed to this kind of blatant disregard for the safety of all beings on our planet. #2. I’m very uncertain about the status of AI as a moral patient. Should we continue to treat it like an inanimate object / a basic computer program? Or perhaps it has some extremely basic sentience like an insect? Maybe something more sophisticated like an animal? M