I think "makes 50% of currently-skeptical people change their minds" is a high bar for a warning shot. On that definition e.g. COVID-19 will probably not be a warning shot for existential risk from pandemics. I do think it is plausible that AI warning shots won't be much better than pandemic warning shots. (On your definition it seems likely that there won't ever again be a warning shot for any existential risk.)
For a more normal bar, I expect plenty of AI systems to fail at large scales in ways that seem like "malice," and then to cover up the fact that they've failed. AI employees will embezzle funds, AI assistants will threaten and manipulate their users, AI soldiers will desert. Events like this will make it clear to most people that there is a serious problem, which plenty of people will be working on in order to make AI useful. The base rate will remain low but there will be periodic high-profile blow-ups.
I don't expect this kind of total unity of AI motivations you are imagining, where all of them want to take over the world (so that the only case where you see something frightening is a failed bid to take over the world). That seems pretty unlikely to me, though it's conceivable (maybe 10-20%?) and may be an important risk scenario. I think it's much more likely that we stamp out all of the other failures gradually, and are left with only the patient+treacherous failures, and in that case whether it's a warning shot or not depends entirely on how much people are willing to generalize.
I do think the situation in the AI community will be radically different after observing these kinds of warning shots, even if we don't observe an AI literally taking over a country.
There is a very narrow range of AI capability between "too stupid to do significant damage of the sort that would scare people" and "too smart to fail at takeover if it tried."
Why do you think this is true? Do you think it's true of humans? I think it's plausible if you require "take over a country" but not if you require e.g. "kill plenty of people" or "scare people who hear about it a lot."
(This is all focused on intent alignment warning shots. I expect there will also be other scary consequences of AI that get people's attention, but the argument in your post seemed to be just about intent alignment failures.)
Thanks for this reply. Yes, I was talking about intent alignment warning shots. I agree it would be good to consider smaller warning shots that convince, say, 10% of currently-skeptical people. (I think it is too early to say whether COVID-19 is a 50%-warning shot for existential risk from pandemics. If it does end up killing millions, the societal incompetence necessary to get us to that point will be apparent to most people, I think, and thus most people will be on board with more funding for pandemic preparedness even if before they would have been &quo... (read more)