Some powerful agents (say secret services or the government of... let's say China) would benefit greatly from disrupting anonymous electronic communication as a whole, because that'd force electronic communication to occur in a non-anonymous fashion. People could still encrypt, but it'd at least be known who talked to who, and that's the kind of information that's apparently valued worth billions of dollars and a couple of civil rights. Correct?

But how could you do that? Thoroughly anonymized peer-to-peer networks built to defy surveillance (such as Freenet), appear to successfully make de-anonymizing communication very, very, very hard. If you kill or severely impede less than perfect anonymization services such as Tor, anonymity-liking people can just migrate to services such as Freenet, and your plan to disrupt anonymous electronic communication has backfired. Correct?

But what you can do is attack not the anonymity, but the communication inside that anonymity. All you need to do is flood the anonymous medium with disruptive pseudo-communication. Spam is the obvious example, but (especially if there are web-of-trust-like structures between the anonymization and the actual communication) you can't make your bots too easy to identify - but as far as it is still possible, you can simply throw in more and more bots.

How do you identify bots as such? You do Turing tests of course. How do you identify lots and lots of bots as such? You do completely automated Turing tests, or Captchas. Not necessarily the ones we have, which are apparently somewhat solvable with the current state of machine learning, but better ones. Captchas have already improved, because they had to. Surely there can be better ones, or sites can start to require perfect performance on ten different Captchas at once for acceptance as a non-bot, or charge (even anonymously, using something like bitcoin) for the privilege of getting to take the Captcha. But once you get to the level where narrow AIs can solve Captchas as successfully as humans, the floodgates are open.

And then anyone who benefits from disrupting all anonymous electronic communication can - and will - do so. Non-anonymity will be promoted as "a small price to pay" to get rid of the bot plague, and everyone will live happy ever after - except those in that vast majority of countries that does not have a First Amendment, and are scared of their governments for very good reasons. They'll retreat into non-electronic communication of course, but that can't be the way forward, can it?

AI DOES NOT MEAN FULLY AUTONOMOUS AGENT

For sure. But fully autonomous agents are a goal a lot of people will surely be working towards, no? I don't think anyone is claiming "every AI project is dangerous". They are claiming something more like "AI with the ability to do pretty much all the things human minds do is dangerous", with the background presumption that as AI advances it becomes more and more likely that someone will produce an AI with all those abilities.

I can PROGRAM an agent so that it never walks out of a box. It never wants to.

Again: for sure, but that isn't the point at issue.

One exciting but potentially scary scenario involving AI is this: we make AI systems that are better than us at making AI systems, let them get to work designing their successors, let them design their successors, etc. End result (hopefully): a dramatically better AI than we could hope to make on our own. Another, closely related: we make AI systems that have the ability to reconfigure themselves by improving their own software and maybe even adjusting their hardware.

In any of these cases, you may be confident that the AI you initially built doesn't want to get out of whatever box you put it in. But how sure are you that after 20 iterations of self-modification, or of replacing an AI by the successor it designed, you still have something that doesn't want to get out of the box?

There are ways to avoid having to worry about that. We can just make AI systems that neither self-modify nor design new AI systems, for instance. But if we are ever to make AIs smarter than us, the temptation to use that smartness to make better AIs will be very strong, and it only requires one team to try it to expose us to any risks that might ensue.

(One further observation: telling people they're stupid and you're laughing at them is not usually effective in making them take your arguments more seriously. To some observers it may suggest that you are aware there's a weakness in your own arguments. ("Argument weak; shout louder."))

I think gjm responded pretty effectively so I'm just going to note that it really isn't helpful if you want to have a dialogue with other humans to spend your time insulting them. It makes them less likely to listen, it makes one less likely to listen one's self (since one sets up a mental block where it is cognitively unpleasant to admit one was wrong when one was) and makes bystanders who are reading less likely to take your ideas seriously.

By the way Eray, you claimed back last November here that 2018 was a reasonable target for "trans-sapient" entities. Do you still stand by that?