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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

#161

Post by emptybits »

riazrizvi wrote: post #124
emptybits wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. But I'm not sure sure which decision maker is more myopic toward the big picture and long-lasting implications of a decision: an LLM, or the top brass at the Department Of War.

It's not their domain, it's the domain of the Commander-In-Chief and his entire apparatus. The War Department are meant to be more focused around the tools they bring to the table. The first line in the article describes a crisis between two powers. Not a theater of war.

Fair enough and thanks for the correction. I think my point may still stand: between the LLM or the Chief ... which decision maker will be most in tune with the long-term common good of the populace?

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

#162

Post by notahacker »

rdksu wrote: post #8

The article is so opaque in arriving at its conclusion; no prompts are disclosed, and nothing about the said simulation. What is stopping me from believing that you just put 'mandatory usage of nukes' in your system prompt?

The TLDR version of the papers being linked to is that the prompts didn't make nukes mandatory, but they did make it clear it that destroying opponent capability was and that nukes were an option...

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

#163

Post by aaron695 »

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…

[dead]

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

#164

Post by narsonika »

pugworthy wrote: post #120

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 ba…

>Is there really anything about them that's bad?

Everything. Major one is radioactive contamination, the effects of it are devastating and last significantly longer. The only other weapon on par with nukes are bioweapons, stuff like mirror life (and scientists appropriately reacted alarmingly to that as well).

The reason we have a mental block is because it deserves one. A quick skimming through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas... should be enough to convince you.

My family was in the zone of lower contamination when Chernobyl happened and after radioactive rainfall there were many instances of various cancers in people in the area. It is extremely ignorant to not have a mental block in anything regarding nukes.

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

#165

Post by sciencejerk »

Bender wrote: post #91
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.

Lack of a drive for self-preservation doesn't in itself imply a lack of intelligence or of self-awareness. I have not seen any evidence of intelligence or self awareness. It mimics human behavior and I suspect that is what gives people the impression of awareness. The same problem happened with Tamagotchi toys. The human mimicry caused kids to get in trouble because if they did not "feed" their pet it would "die" . […

They might as well be aware. The frontier models are very good at imitating the real thing

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

#166

Post by Majromax »

This blog post is based on a paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14740). The paper is based on a simulated wargame. The wargame is of the author's own design.

The wargame design does not differentiate between ordinary defeat and mutually assured destruction, so of course a player about to use would 'push the button.' That's also believed to be true in real life.

Results based on simulations can be very informative, but we must always be careful to check how well the simulation framework represents reality.

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

#167

Post by orlp »

pugworthy wrote: post #120

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 ba…

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

A full-on nuclear war will literally make a large portion of our planet uninhabitable for anyone for centuries, and leave the rest severely crippled and contaminated.

Sorry I know we're supposed to be kind and whatnot in these comments but I can't help but explicitly state that your comment is one of the dumbest things I've read on this site in a while. I hope you otherwise have a good day.

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

#168

Post by the_af »

andai wrote: post #44
andix wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4o was considered harmful, because it imitated human connection too much, not because it was so "smart" or capable. It was for sure a deliberate decision to make LLMs seem less like a human companion and more like an obedient servant in newer releases.

Interesting. The reasoning models were super weird and robotic. They toned that down a bit in GPT-5.x, especially the later ones. I always assumed the strange style was an artefact of the RLVR.

I think they've brought back a "personality" of sorts to ChatGPT 5.x. I've caught it more than once explaining something to me and saying "In my personal opinion", or "I personally enjoy the most". Which is always jarring, it doesn't "personally" or "enjoy" anything. We could be discussing videogames and it tells me which games "it personally enjoys the most". Bizarre.

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

#169

Post by richardw »

I generally accuse LLM’s of having no sense of value. The machine will make a complicated plan but entirely lose sight of eg the fact that response time matters to humans.

Not always, but enough that I consider it a thing to fire in a direction, not a thing that aims.

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

#170

Post by the_af »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #107

My personal take is a pre-requisite of true human-like AI is physical feedback and a concept of emotions or something like it. Without physical feedback you can rapidly devolve into unstable positive feedback loops. And emotions are what help us process and react to that feedback. Kids learn partially because their friends say sharp words that hurt them, fire burns them, they go hungry and starve if they don’t plan f…

> My personal take is a pre-requisite of true human-like AI is physical feedback and a concept of emotions or something like it.

Ted Chiang's recent article, which received a lot of pushback from HN'ers (but not from me, I agree with Chiang) claimed for true consciousness the AI needs a physical body, and emotions (which means organs and hormones and a system capable of feeling emotions). I would also add that to behave more rationally, it should have a real sense -- not a roleplayed one -- of self-preservation and a notion that bad choices can lead to an end to its existence.

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