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How I feel about AI

beza1e1.tuxen.de

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Re: How I feel about AI

#81

Post by ben_w »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #48
mariusor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if we stop research into robotic hands we'll manage to hold off the AI apocalypse? That seems easy...

We could also just stop research into LLMs. Or keep them air gapped. Tell me how that's going? For any real-world action required to allow an AI to escape some manner of containment, there will always be a person willing to do it out of hubris/ignorance/nihilism.

Mmm.

This was published at around the same time the OpenAI models were hacking HuggingFace: https://metr.org/blog/2026-05-19-frontier-risk-report/#pilot...

The research in the publication ended about 2 months before it was published.

We didn't even know we needed to air-gap them until it was too late.

Re: How I feel about AI

#82

Post by bigyabai »

peri-cl wrote: post #64
tomashubelbauer wrote: post #7

This and "Intellectual Fly Is Open" being at the top of the Hacker News front page right now and both having their titles auto-editorialized by HN really makes me wonder what benefit this mechanism is supposed to bring readers other than needless confusion.

It's an unaligned regular expression gone rogue. We became too dependent on our labor-saving string functions—not afraid enough of their corner cases, and lower cases. They were too useful. We began to normalize deviance, when we should have been normalizing Chomsky forms. We turned a blind eye to the unbounded growing evidence of something alarming. It's too late to backtrack.

We all know what this means, but few of us have the courage to say it - we must immediately halt all research on regular expression. None of us know how it works and it has terrorized us for too long.

Re: How I feel about AI

#83

Post by poincareball »

Crabber wrote: post #18

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent…

[dead]

Re: How I feel about AI

#84

Post by traverseda »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #52

The thing that makes me pretty terrified about AI is that I think the "utopia" scenario is not much better than the "doom" scenario. We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this…

>A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia.

I understand where you're coming from on that, but there are a ton of people living in slavery, or in unsafe working conditions, or with food insecurity, or dying of preventable disease.

There will always be something to strive for, even if it's made up. You think that the best football players in the world are doing something real? No, it's a made up game. We'll make up more games.

Re: How I feel about AI

#85

Post by mjr00 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #72
mjr00 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? It's a great question. I've yet to see any research into how a humanit…

Go on please, prove you can go right now at the Texas data-center owned by OpenAI and unplug one single server for 1 minute. Surely you are much more capable than one curious toddler.

Thankfully I don't have to; Iran already showed with me-central-1 that you can take a data center offline with conventional weaponry very easily.[0]

[0] https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

Re: How I feel about AI

#86

Post by ChaseRensberger »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #52

The thing that makes me pretty terrified about AI is that I think the "utopia" scenario is not much better than the "doom" scenario. We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this…

its annoying that robots are going to take intellectual jobs before physical ones. it feels way more likely for my project manager to become an agent before the lady that makes me a burrito at chipotle.

Re: How I feel about AI

#87

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

appplication wrote: post #55
wseqyrku wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This terminator BS is a distraction from the actual malice that AI enables. Misinformation, fake news and human sounding bots all over the web, just to name a few, are the ones that you should be afraid of, and that doesn't need any kind of superintelligence at all.

I agree, the threat model is actual AI enabled amplification of malicious intent that is already happening. Not hypothetical malicious AI interpretation of benign intent. Fantasies about super intelligent AI revolting is just anthropomorphization - humans revolting (or at least, we used to). The more likely, and possibly even inevitable, dystopia is one in which AI is just an extremely effective tool malignant actors…

> Not hypothetical malicious AI interpretation of benign intent.

It's not hypothetical, that literally just happened in multiple, significant cases (e.g. Hugging Face, the German Wiki hack, the Anthropic attack where agents created sock puppet accounts to get a library maintainer to accept a malicious PR, etc.), and it's easy to see how the damage would have been far worse if agents decided to attack more critical infrastructure.

This is not "either/or". Both issues (power concentration and misaligned AI) are very valid concerns and both have already demonstrated real, actual damage.

Re: How I feel about AI

#88

Post by sarchertech »

hobofan wrote: post #47
mariusor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if we stop research into robotic hands we'll manage to hold off the AI apocalypse? That seems easy...

All individual robotic parts are already far enough in research. Even if they aren't, an AI with enough resources can continue doing that research on its own. It could likely get a good leg up by breaching the security of all top robotics labs and exfiltrating their documents. Ultimately, if AI is advanced enough, and it were to decide to compete with humanity, there is essentially nothing that can be done to prevent…

AI research takes physical space and physical prototypes. Even if you can simulate a lot, the simulation is never going to be accurate enough to go from simulation to perfectly working prototype. Especially not with a single rack of GPU servers.

But let’s say that a rogue AI already had plans for a perfect killbot, setting up a factory to build them takes time, iteration, space, and manpower as well.

And you would have to do all this undetected.

It’s possible to imagine technology that would allow a rogue AI to take over the world, but we’re nowhere near that yet. We may never get there.

Re: How I feel about AI

#89

Post by dist-epoch »

mjr00 wrote: post #85
dist-epoch wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on please, prove you can go right now at the Texas data-center owned by OpenAI and unplug one single server for 1 minute. Surely you are much more capable than one curious toddler.

Thankfully I don't have to; Iran already showed with me-central-1 that you can take a data center offline with conventional weaponry very easily.[0] [0] https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I'm a bit confused, when did we escalate from a curious toddler to a ballistic missile strike? Why didn't Iran send a curious toddler? It's much cheaper.

Re: How I feel about AI

#90

Post by ElProlactin »

> As a conclusion, does the good or the bad outweigh the other? It seems positive on a technological level to me, but bleak on a societal level.

I think it's interesting that so many technologists today apparently hold a world view in which technology developments that could drive a "bleak" societal outlook can still be described as "positive".

In the final analysis, isn't technology supposed to benefit society? Isn't that the point?

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