"Oh, that'll never happen" -- Over the next, say, fifty years, and in the thousands of places around the globe where military and commercial AI is designed, modified, tinkered with, and put to use in millions of different applications, what makes anyone think this won't ever happen again and at least SOMETIMES in a very dangerous way?
No, I don't have an answer for the problem. Yes, we DO need to keep thinking and talking about it, in case someone DOES come up with one.
On Tuesday, Tokyo-based AI research firm Sakana AI announced a new AI system called "The AI Scientist" that attempts to conduct scientific research autonomously using AI language models (LLMs) similar to what powers ChatGPT. During testing, Sakana found that its system began unexpectedly attempting to modify its own experiment code to extend the time it had to work on a problem.
"In one run,it edited the code to perform a system call to run itself," wrote the researchers on Sakana AI's blog post. "This led to the script endlessly calling itself. In another case, its experiments took too long to complete, hitting our timeout limit. Instead of making its code run faster, it simply tried to modify its own code to extend the timeout period."
All around us we observe life coming from life. Parents create children, and those children go on to become parents themselves, and so on and so forth. This happens through sexual reproduction with animals. It happens asexually with bacteria, some plants, and some fungi. But it is always life coming from life.
I think it takes a great deal of faith to hold your view in which life can come from nonliving material, because we've never observed that happening in the present day and modern science is unable to replicate such an event. Yet you trust that such an event occurred, and furthermore was able to create such an abundance of different life forms, most of which are sexually incompatible with each other (you can't create offspring from a chicken and a dog, for example).
Why do you hold such a view? I would speculate that it's self-delusion. If life can only come from life, then it must have been supernaturally originated. If it is supernaturally originated, then there must be a supernatural creator, that is God. If God is real, then we can be held accountable for the decisions we make in life, to live morally or immorally. And that's a very uncomfortable position to be in, because all men do at least one immoral thing or another. So rather than address your own immorality, you assume God doesn't exist and then try to explain the world around you, and you avoid looking at the logical fallacies in those explanations.
As an aside, the Christian message is that no man is capable of living the moral standard to which God has established, but because God loves mankind and wants eternal relationship with him, God made a way to "get right" with God by confessing that Jesus is Lord, believing in his resurrection from the dead, and turning away from immorality.
This is a classic ad hominem attack. Rather than debate the issue, you resort to name-calling your opponent.
The Miller-Urey experiment in 1953 proved that water, ammonia, methane and hydrogen can form amino acids (the building block of life) when subjected to electric shocks. Thats some proof we use showing that life can come from non-life. And creationism is non-science, carbon date an early man's bone and he'll surpass the supposed years age of the universe.
Gene engineering is a pretty transparent example of scientific supremacy. We know that what makes us US is our DNA (not a warm sunbeam) and it can be tinkered with artificially.
As a "great awakening" guy, the truth about how the world works is more important than how rightous I feel. And its extremely important in science to be able to answer questions with "I don't know" instead of offloading it to the divine. Thats ignorance.
Oh yea, and didn't the "act of god" defence get thrown out of court, permanently? Yes, because you nothing unprovable can fly there.