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So far I have done anything, but last night (I kid you not) I passed this old dude in Walmart. In his cart were 10 loaves of bread, 6 gallons of milk, and a gigantic thing of toilet paper. I thought he was prepping for some hurricane nobody else knew about, but maybe it’s the threat of an imminent AI takeover???
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Yes. I no longer look at the expiration/sell by/use by date on grocery items that I buy.
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That’s rather depressing. Is that because you think the end is that near? 
No, it’s because I have four dogs so food rarely lasts more than a day or two in our household. But, it gave me an opening to reply to your thoughtful thread in a mildly humorous manner.
Thank you for starting this thread.
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One thing that sort of bugs me is that I think that the vast majority of us do not actually know what AI can or can’t do, or how it works. Many, many years ago I thought that I was an AI major and took multiple courses in it. As a former math major I should have the mathematical background to understand it. I still do not know how it works or what it does. AI has changed a lot since I looked at it (it has been 50 years).
I am under the impression that you give AI a problem to solve, and it is quite a bit more creative and flexible than computers used to be in terms of trying to solve the problem. Details are fuzzy in my mind.
I think that someone needs to carefully verify anything that AI comes up with. I happen to know one machine learning expert who says that his job is mostly just verifying what AI / ML comes up with. It is not always going to be right. When it is right it is very, very good. When it is wrong it still sounds authoritative, but it can be very wrong.
Hopefully people will use it in responsible ways. Perhaps we could say the same thing about technology in general.
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DH has started doing a bit of prepping. He isn’t preparing for an end of civilization scenario, more for someone taking down the electrical grid or water system for a few weeks.
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I am on septic and well, with a natural gas whole house standby generator. I have amassed food in my basement as part of my buy-what’s-on-sale personality. I could probably survive for a bit based on these facts, but none of it is on purpose.
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The prior construction of AI has been largely superseded. In the past, AI achievements were based on human coding expertise combined with the brute force calculations of the hardware. These weren’t so much intelligent systems as they were simply highly capable systems. Modern AI, in contrast, relies on neural networks, with limited human input. To illustrate, it took 11 to 12 years of continuous human effort to design a program, with requisite hardware, to defeat the world chess champion. Through modern neural networks, these efforts were exceeded by letting a system play against, and learn from, a version of itself. This took four hours.
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We were a one wine club family and resisted joining additional wine clubs for years, but this year we finally joined another one. My husband recently looked at our wine cellar and commented that it looked like a prepper’s dream. 
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Well, it certainly would be our dream. Maybe that’s what we should concentrate on building, a wine cellar!
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We anthropomorphize it to assign attributes like intelligence, thinking, etc. but it’s still just mathing trying to predict the next word, but blazingly fast now.
Can that technology be used in a dangerous way? Arguably, in their benchmark race towards IPOs, Anthropic and Open AI are already have. It isn’t inherently dangerous on its own though. Cal Newport describes it like this…AI is a weed wacker. Tie it to a dogs tail and unintended things could happen. It’s not the weed wacker’s fault though. It’s a weed wacker. The fault lies in the hands of the people who tied it to the dog’s tail.
Thus far, the recent “great advancements” (and unintended consequences) are because the labs pointed the LLMs in those directions, not because the models have learned to “think.”
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To dance alone in his ballroom?
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Is he storing food and water, or what in particular is he doing? I feel like I ought to be doing something, but all I’m doing is carbo loading and building up body fat. 
I actually am more worried about my kids. They have a lot of life in front of them. Not to be morbid, but I have maybe 15-20 years before dementia gets me (bad genes), but I’m fighting it. My life, not a big deal, but their lives are.
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I feel the same way. Plus the grandkids!
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Much bigger concern than AI.
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In chess, AI is fast and novel.
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Is AI ushering in the End of the World?
No. The true concern is who is controlling it. It can be a propaganda WWIII. All fought on the internet between nations who want to control the minds of citizens around the world. All fought between companies with legitimate but differing goals.
Am I preparing for it? No. But my kids shield my grandkids from unnecessary exposure to media. That’s one way to prepare. Better for their mental health. Am I prepared for the internet to disappear tomorrow? No.
Would I shut down AI? No. It’s a fabulous tool. Right now I see it taking the information gathering properties it has as a way to cure cancer and a myriad of many other diseases.
So many uses.
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I enjoy using AI to answer questions, though sometimes it is very clearly wrong, and tells me what I want to hear instead of the truth.
As far as it mattering who is in control of it, seems like a small number of companies are in control now, and I doubt they can be trusted to have humanities best interests front and center.
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In reality, there are no novel moves in chess. Every possible move is all ready known and has been known for a LONG time. Unconventional certainly applies though.
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