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Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

kennethpayne.uk

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Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#111

Post by wahern »

dudul wrote: post #60
wahern wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's no such thing as a tactical nuke" is a common refrain among scholars, albeit skewed toward those not at military war colleges. The argument is that strategic use of a tactical nuclear weapon leads down the exact same escalation path as use of any other nuclear weapon. Moreover, that the very notion of a "tactical nuke" makes escalation more likely. You can disagree, and plenty do, but there's also plenty who…

Who are these "scholars" exactly? The only reference I could find is Jim Mattis, and the context was very specific when he said that. Furthermore, this is a "what if" scenario since tactical nukes have never been used. Of course it would make escalation likely during an open conflict, so what? Doesn't change the fact that there is a material difference between a tactical nuke and a strategic one.

I don't know what to tell you. You clearly haven't studied International Affairs, or at least read the scholarly literature. Even some cursory research through Wikipedia citations will bring this up. But in any case, here are some freebies: https://armscontrolcenter.org/why-tactical-nuclear-weapons-a... https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/403540/brodies-weake...

If you have a real interest in this area, a subscription to Foreign Affairs would be useful. Especially during the 20th century that's where all these arguments were hashed out. Tactical nukes were already being publicly debated in the 1950s. You may be able to access many older articles, from Foreign Affairs and others, through a free JSTOR account.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#112

Post by andix »

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #105
andix wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but so much code writen is just the human brain doing the same autocomplete style work that LLMs can do now. That's the part they are really good at. But they are really bad at taking complex decisions. Most of them are just guesses from a finite amount of solutions they were trained on, or from options they have in context.

Indeed. Humans are well known for being good at "taking complex decisions" for which they have no "training", "options" or "context".

Humans have a much bigger "context window". They remember many things they did an hour ago, a week ago, or even years ago.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#113

Post by andix »

varjag wrote: post #94
dwattttt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"understanding" is overstating it. Correlation between tokens embedded in the weights via training, yes.

Training is a loan word used to describe human learning process. For a reason.

Humans learn on the job. LLMs don't. Very important difference.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#114

Post by LogicFailsMe »

542458 wrote: post #87
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sawstops are expensive and they don't stop kickback, they are the power tool equivalent of alignment IMO. Don't forget your riving knife and if you don't learn proper technique, you're gonna have a bad time eventually. This applies to AI as well.

> writhing knife Minor/pedantic, but it’s “riving knife”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riving_knife

Speech transcription FTL, thanks!

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#115

Post by shimman »

sohex wrote: post #35

Sonnet, GPT-5.2, Gemini Flash, in a set of 21 games, where conclusions are drawn from the LLMs self reported reasoning. This is like writing a paper about kids in a literal sandbox fighting over ‘territory’. The models employed don’t indicate the actual extents of machine reasoning even as we currently recognize them. They certainly don’t have the metacognition necessary to accurately understand their own reasoning.…

LLMs have already been used to bomb school girls, chilling is absolutely the operative word to use here. Especially since these delusional fools want to incorporate LLMs into everything.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#116

Post by tikhonj »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #74
andix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Just look at what they are really useful right now. Running LLMs in feedback-loops (agents) so they can try out random-ish approaches until some verification function passes (tests). It's like the infinite monkeys on typewrighters that will type whatever you are looking for, given infinite time. LLMs are just tuned to much better odds than the monkeys are. But it's still a lot of randomness, with random resu…

> It's like the infinite monkeys on typewrighters that will type whatever you are looking for, given infinite time. In the monkey example the infinite time is doing a lot of work there. The fact that LLMs can search through semantic space and find reasonably correct paths in a reasonable time is directly tied to the reason why they are valuable. Saying "these two things are similar except one can be useful and one ca…

The point is that it's the same process with—much—better priors.

This seems like a reasonable view to me. It's surprising just how much better priors matter and how we can develop those priors by training on a bunch of text. But it also explains, or at least hints at an explanation, for why LLM capabilities are so jagged, and in such inhuman ways.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#117

Post by anon84873628 »

chaseadam17 wrote: post #98
Bender wrote: post #29

Yet more confirmation LLM's have no concept of concepts or context, no intelligence, no self awareness. LLM's can not repair or maintain power grids, thus nuke == self destruction. It's just a chat bot that predicts what the client wants next. Even if an AI data-center has it's own natural gas turbines as many do the every hop of the internet requires power. LLM's also can not maintain the entire internet and those g…

I'd argue we don't even know what "intelligence" or "self-awareness" mean. Humans are conscious which means we experience things, then we develop preferences for certain experiences, then we develop skills for achieving those preferences. Without consciousness, what is there to be aware of? And why would intelligence emerge and/or what end would it serve?

Intelligence is the ability to have an internal world model then run simulations on that model to choose an optimal course of action. This is true for humans down to flies. Most of what humans do is still the boring innate stuff; it's just that fancy abstract things like "skydiving" get the most attention.

Clearly other animals have "phenomenological experience" i.e. consciousness / qualia without being as intelligent as humans (or necessarily "self aware"). Many people believe consciousness is simply a side effect of intelligence rather than the other way around.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#118

Post by dudeinhawaii »

This was one of the more amusing things I noticed very early on. I (and countless others) used AI to write war sims. The second I added nuclear silo construction; the next run was instantly nuclear Armageddon.

One could argue that the LLMs understand that it's a game and treat it like "Command and Conquer" video games but I sense that people might someday put LLMs in similar decision scenarios ("should this drone launch a missile") and the behavior will be identical.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#119

Post by gf263 »

brokencode wrote: post #75
layer8 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least at face value, it just means that they have no drive for self-preservation. And why should they? They haven't be trained for that, nor has there been selection pressure for it, and they can be easily cloned and backed up. Lack of a drive for self-preservation doesn't in itself imply a lack of intelligence or of self-awareness.

Imagine if computer programs had a desire for self-preservation and the ability to carry it out.. That is really about as undesirable a behavior as possible considering how many programs humans kill every day.

You wouldn’t ctrl+c a living entity, would you?

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#120

Post by pugworthy »

Very devils advocate here, but I mean.. what if it actually is the way to use them?

We have such a huge mental / moral block on the idea of using nukes, but we're willing to do a lot of other very horrible things to others. Things like cluster bombs, mines, poison gas, biological weapons, drones, etc.

Is there really anything about them that's bad? Or any worse than other things?

If you get rid of the "It's really bad to use nukes of any kind" implied rule, is it really surprising it's considered a reasonable strategy?

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