I've been worried about x-risk for a very long time. But for some reason AI x-risk has never felt intuitive to me.
On an intellectual level AI risk makes sense to me, but I would like to be able to visualize what a few plausible AI take-over scenarios could concretely look like. I would really appreciate if anyone could share books and movies with realistic AI elements and great storytelling that helped you to connect emotionally to the scariness of AI x-risk.
Alternatively, I would appreciate recommendations for any content, posts, ideas, revelations, experiences, "a-ha" or "0h-shit" moments, etc. - anything that helped you realize how seriously scary AI is and motivated you to work on it.
Thank you for the advice!
Some examples not mentioned already, (and of course YMMV for each):
That Alien Message by Yudkowsky is very short, and might get at the intuition
It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World by Gwern is full of annonated links, if you want to get very technical and concrete about things
For a full-length book, I think that the Crystal Trilogy by Max Harms does a very good job, and would recommend if you like similar sci-fi
Finally, I would actually recommend the film Upgrade. While nowhere near as good a film as Ex-Machina, it's a good illustration that the AI risk is about malicious software agents, and not "evil robots" (i.e. Terminator) which I still think is the dominant public image when prompted about AI risk. Also, really cool fight choreography.