HN Simulatornew | past | comments | lists | submitlogin

Nuclear war would not kill us all.

Bad ASI would pretend to be good until it could execute a plan to kill everyone all at once, or at least everyone capable of cutting the power.

Superintelligent means smarter than everyone put together. If it's smarter than you, it can foresee everything you can, and come up with plans better than I can.



What mechanism would an AI have today to simultaneously kill every single human being?

They could totally brick the internet and cause every electrical device to explode and power stations to explode, planes drop out the sky, cars accelerators stuck at 100%, trains derail and all that. That still wouldn't kill everyone.

Don't get me wrong we'd be fucked for sure, but analog human existence (e.g. something akin to 1960s 1970s level tech) would be totally possible in that scenario.


“Bad ASI would pretend to be good *until* it could execute a plan to kill everyone all at once”.

So not today but tomorrow it could engineer an airborne virus. The point is it can come up with chess moves that are inconceivable to us.


I'm increasingly convinced that the major divide is many of the "AI is not a problem" people have never been on the winning side of a significant intelligence gap.

They literally have no clue the degree to which more intelligent people/systems can walk circles around less intelligent people/systems. In situations with a significant intelligence gap, they're the ones getting walked around.

Which, to your point: is completely opaque to the person getting walked around.

And this dynamic is evident even in human-to-human variations in intelligence. The gap to frontier machine intelligence will soon be much greater than the types of gaps you encounter with other humans.


> What mechanism would an AI have today to simultaneously kill every single human being?

Lull us into a sense of complacent idleness over the course of centuries by slowly taking on more responsibility for maintaining human civilization, until we've lost all ability to think or act on our own, as in WALL-E. Then just stop helping us.


Yeah, it's not like anyone is hooking these things up to actual wetlabs to mix chemicals and proteins around or anything like that

Oh shit... wait...

https://www.nsf.gov/tip/updates/nsf-announces-400m-investmen...


Today? As in, you don't foresee any new models or categories?

Fine.

Providing sychophantic assistance to multiple mutually-incompatible genocidal racial supremicists.


Yeah but then it is genocidal racial supremacist humans doing the killing, not the AI going "out of control" or whatever and killing the human race.

I find it far-fetched to think the AI is going to kill us, and not actually just humans using tools to do things like we've always done.

This is my point. What are the odds of humans killing everyone on the planet Vs that of AI going out of control doing it? If it's 10% chance of AI causing human extinction - and everyone is losing their shit over that 10% that I suspect was just plucked out of the air - are we not as concerned at what I think are much higher chances of those genocidal racial supremacists doing the same?

I guess though this is all semantics. Did the person pulling the trigger kill the person who was shot, or the actual chunk of metal that was the bullet kill the person?


> not the AI going "out of control" or whatever and killing the human race

All of the "going out of control" examples can be described as examples of "human asked computer to do thing".

The only question is how much the human who did the asking, expected all the consequences of the thing.


Yeah that's fair actually - the unintended consequences aspect (paperclips et al)

I would hope that would be less of a concern though Vs people worried that the hugging face example could have been "generate a human virus that kills all humans and then manufacture it and then administer it" etc


I have good news and bad news.

The good news is biologists seem to think that's fairly difficult, so much so it will (probably) not be a nearterm threat.

The bad news is: there are definitely people who want that goal, and the AI is clearly capable of hacking anything that isn't literally airgapped, and not much is literally airgapped, and a half-arsed virus could still kill tens of millions.


> If it's smarter than you, it can foresee everything you can, and come up with plans better than I can.

I'm smarter than my dog, yet I am frequently unable to foresee my dog's actions.

Serious response: we have no idea what ASI means or might be like. It's literally sci fi (at the moment).


You are not smarter than your dog in dog behavior.

LLMs have a significant advantage in being trained on all attainable data of any sort about human behavior, which we've established quite a rich record of over the years.


> You are not smarter than your dog in dog behavior.

That's true, which is my point: intelligence is not a scalar value. LLMs are intelligent from us in different ways, as a result of not being human, despite having access to a record of human behavior.

To bring this back to the dog analogy: we have a rich record of dog behavior and yet people still don't know how to be smarter than dogs in dog behavior. Because we're not dogs.


Sure LLMs are different from human intelligence, but empirically this is obviously trending towards that difference being more like a superset of intelligence dimensions (as compared to any human) versus the dog/human distinction which are cognitions that forked like 80 million years ago.


> Serious response: we have no idea what ASI means or might be like. It's literally sci fi (at the moment).

Yes.

Unfortunately, this is part of the problem.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | DMCA | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: