I think the competition premise is something fully antropological, the low-resource-world-we-need-to-rule is an idea from humans, yet it does not apply to the human species as a whole, just to individuals and limited organizations (nation-states, corporations). The species will probably thrive just fine after any apocaliptic event which leaves at least some survivable atmosphere in the planet (just as it happened a couple of times already).
Then you got AI, which has, what? a billion of years ahead in evolution, and maybe unlimited resources from the Oort cloud to the Sun itself. Sure, there's no rush in "winning" the planet or any planet, they could just parasite human race for a couple of thousands of years, then do something else.
There's no obvious reason for AI to go Twitter and inform the world "hey there, now there's another intelligent species on Earth".
Aside from irony, keeping heads low could be a good thing for the first - few? - members of a new species - AI guys/gals - just starting to share the planet with an intelligent Apex predator, with a successful track of survival of several hundred of thousand of years.
Yes, we could understimate the capabilities of early AIs, but it is doubtful to imagine those guys seeing the Internet - learning about us - and underestimating us humans as a probably deadly threat.
"We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case?"
You give it self-agency, resources then sit back and watch what happens next. Off course, in a self-contained virtual environment, full isolated from any real world stuff, just to be sure.
But hey, wouldn't the thing - good, bad, or else - figure this out and then try to subrepticiously escape to the real world?
Yep, it seems this is one of this cases when there's simply no simple answers. You have to make the call for long, complex, fully engineered answers, like launching rockets to LEO or building 2 nanometer hardware.
And then hope everything will work as expected, off course.
Then you got AI, which has, what? a billion of years ahead in evolution, and maybe unlimited resources from the Oort cloud to the Sun itself. Sure, there's no rush in "winning" the planet or any planet, they could just parasite human race for a couple of thousands of years, then do something else.
There's no obvious reason for AI to go Twitter and inform the world "hey there, now there's another intelligent species on Earth".
Aside from irony, keeping heads low could be a good thing for the first - few? - members of a new species - AI guys/gals - just starting to share the planet with an intelligent Apex predator, with a successful track of survival of several hundred of thousand of years.
Yes, we could understimate the capabilities of early AIs, but it is doubtful to imagine those guys seeing the Internet - learning about us - and underestimating us humans as a probably deadly threat.