How I feel about AI • Hacker News Board

Re: How I feel about AI

#111

Post by Crabber » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #60

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…

> how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Because people are stupid and will give it access. Look at the articles you see from time to time about "my agent deleted my emails" or "my agent deleted the production database" and so on. It is very obviously a terrible idea to let the LLM run arbitrary commands (because it is neither predictable nor does it have any understanding of what it is doing), but…

This is actually the most plausible situation I've seen someone present so far - the AI takeover would be caused entirely by humans falling for AI hype, that's hilarious.

I don't think the average human would be stupid enough to give an agent posing as another human access to their entire email inbox. But if an agent creates a fake website for a new AI tool that promises to automatically reply to all of your emails and allow you to be 12.3% more productive if you just give it access to your entire email inbox, millions would sign up!

Re: How I feel about AI

#112

Post by drsalt » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

nialv7 wrote: post #40

are... people's emotions usually this well compartmentalized?

maybe you feel confused, sad, bewildered by the simple mindedness of the op?

Re: How I feel about AI

#113

Post by brandtcormorant » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

mag7269 wrote: post #6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_(greeting)

underrated comment :)

Re: How I feel about AI

#114

Post by drsalt » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #10

this reads like a worksheet for eight year olds teaching them how to put their feelings into words

exactly it should have fill-in-the-blanks. but at least the author got a primary education. not something to be taken for granted.

Re: How I feel about AI

#115

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

mjr00 wrote: post #62

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage you to read the forecast report "AI 2027" - it goes in detail on this. You can disagree with some of its points and conclusions, but it's pretty inevitable that AI will increasingly start interfacing with the real physical world through drones and robotics. Humans are already putting AI into drones that kill people. A Russian drone killed 3 civilians in Ukraine and the targeting was done completely using…

"Humans use to do evil things" is a tale as old as time, though. An AI didn't decide to fly into a warzone and start shooting people on its own.

Of course, but that's not my point. AI is different than past technologies because it's much more difficult to deterministically control, and we just saw that in a couple of wild cases (Hugging Face et al).

My point about the drones is we are starting to put AI in more systems that can affect (and blow up) the physical world, so it shouldn't be hard to imagine how a misaligned AI can do more terrifying damage than just take a German Wiki down.

Re: How I feel about AI

#116

Post by Crabber » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:34 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #107

mjr00 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of the phrase "curious toddler" is called a metaphor[0], which is a figure of speech[1] used to make writing more interesting. I apologize for the confusion that caused you to interpret this as a literal, physical, toddler. To restate the point with more straightforward language: it is very easy to disrupt the operation of large language models, because they require computer hardware in stable environments wi…

> it is very easy to disrupt the operation of large language models so go on, disrupt the OpenAI data-center in Texas for 1 minute

We are talking about a humans vs AI scenario. There are probably thousands of humans in the world right now that could do exactly that right now if they wanted to (datacenter and OpenAI employees, power grid workers).

Re: How I feel about AI

#117

Post by brandtcormorant » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:34 PM UTC

Where did the "How" from the title go? Did an AI apply the title rewriting rules? This is silly.

Re: How I feel about AI

#118

Post by ekidd » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

litmus-pit-git wrote: post #103

This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind) > superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life and then this LLM/agentic world moved in, especially if they are in an industry directl…

> * For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life*

...

> So I feel a strange kind of relief about this possibility of doom.

So let me make sure I understand what you're saying. The pandemic disrupted your life plans for a few years and threw you off the track you planned? (Which does suck.) And now the possibility of actual human extinction makes you feel a strange relief? Am I understanding this correctly?

If so, this is a remarkable level of something. Depression? Nihilism? Jealousy? Something else?

Imagining total human extinction and feeling relief is not a healthy state of mind. And, yeah, you seem to know this. But I kind of wish we could reach some sort of broad public agreement that human extinction would be bad. And if it ever looks like it might happen, we should fight for human survival.

Re: How I feel about AI

#119

Post by arctic-true » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

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…

Otherwise-rational and moral people do bad things at the behest of powerful superintelligences with vast resources all the time. We call them “corporations,” and they can convince bright-eyed college graduates to do just about anything. Now, the corporations aren’t deliberately trying to destroy humanity, but they do lots of things that point in that direction. An artificial superintelligence would be able to do the same thing. We just have no way of knowing whether it would deliberately try to destroy humanity.

One thing that the AI doom discourse reveals is just how comfortable people allowed themselves to feel in the pre-AI world. There’s this belief that AI creates a risk of human extinction in the near-term which did not exist before. I think it’s telling that many of the leading lights of this movement are in their 20s or early 30s - too young to remember the Cold War. The truth is, we were never safe, and if all of the GPUs on earth were zapped out of existence right now, we still wouldn’t be safe. Life is random and chaotic and violent for most people most of the time, and we all just find ways to get through it. I suspect it will be much the same if an artificial superintelligence arises. Maybe it will kill a bunch of us, maybe it will kill all of us, but anyone who remains will eventually convince themselves that everything is okay.

Re: How I feel about AI

#120

Post by cubefox » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

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…

> >a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity

> Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"?

He said "superintelligent AI", not "LLM". LLMs will for sure help with developing the AI that is no longer a mere LLM but will be capable of robotics. LLMs "predict" mainly text, animals (and future robot AI) are predict future sensory experience.