You are the scariest monster in the woods • Hacker News Board

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#171

Post by hdseggbj » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #141

hdseggbj wrote: post #134

The distinction is irrelevant. No one thought the nukes would blow themselves up, but here we are on the precipice of destruction. We aren't going to bury ai in 20 story bunkers to protect llms. Everyone knows the real evil are the people building the ai. We aren't afraid of agi we are afraid of Boston dynamics (aka Google). We are afraid of Bill gates, Sam altman, Jeff bezos, Larry Ellison and elon musk. These are d…

P.S. Boston Dynamics is no longer owned by Google, it's part of Hyundai now.

Ah yes, rings a bell. Doesn't change the sentiment though. They're all crooks and cheaters who will sacrifice the greater good for their own self interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Hyundai_plant_imm...

It's the fear of death that's killing us all.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#172

Post by forgotoldacc » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

kayodelycaon wrote: post #151

bee_rider wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is bad writing on the part of the author. Or maybe good writing for getting us engaged with the blog post, bad for making an argument though. They include a line that they don’t believe in the possibility of AGI: > I don’t really believe in the threat of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence—human-level intelligence) partly because I don’t believe in the possibility of AGI and I’m highly skeptical that the…

I don’t think we’ll be able to replicate consciousness until we’re able to make things alive at a biological level. We can certainly make systems smart enough and people complicit enough to destroy society well before we reach that point.

I guess we also need to define what biological life means. Even biologists have debated whether viruses should be considered life.

And if we determine it must be something with cells that can sustain themselves, we run into a challenge should we encounter extraterrestrials that don't share our evolutionary path.

When we get self-building machines that can repair themselves, move, analyze situations, and respond accordingly, I don't think it's unfair to consider them life. But simply being life doesn't mean it's inherently good. Humans see syphilis bacteria and ticks as living things, but we don't respect them. We acknowledge that polar bears have a consciousness, but they're at odds with our existence if we're put in the same room. If we have autonomous machines that can destroy humans, I think those could be considered life. But it's life that opposes our own.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#173

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

myrmidon wrote: post #13

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

[deleted]

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#174

Post by catapart » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 4:10 PM UTC

I can't figure out why people who write articles like this seem to be oblivious to the very practical argument about the US second amendment that goes along the lines of "guns don't kill people, people do".

To everyone who wants to pose an argument like this, please consider: We have already internalized that very simple, and very thoughtless argument, and have moved past that facile framing to start asking the more pressing questions like "what are we going to do about how humans are using X to perpetrate Y?"

We don't need the extra step of you making us reframe the question to fit your exact criteria of "good question". "AI is going to kill us" can be understood as: "Humans are going to use AI to kill us". The fact that you want to misunderstand it as a more childish argument is your own failings with semiotics. It's so blatantly silly that in most cases, it's less degrading to assume that you are purposefully trying to misdirect the argument than to assume you actually believe people are worried about the agency of inanimate objects. But then you go and write a whole article to preen "logical" at us about how it's just that "no one's asking the right questions!", which kind of makes it hard to imagine that you don't actually think so little of people.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#175

Post by MountDoom » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 4:10 PM UTC

jncfhnb wrote: post #40

myrmidon wrote: post #13

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

I think you could make AGI right now tbh. It’s not a function of intelligence. It’s just a function of stateful system mechanics. LLMs are just a big matrix. But what about a four line of code loop that looks like: ```while true: update_sensory_inputs() narrate_response() update_emotional_state() ``` LLMs don’t experience continuous time and they don’t have an explicit decision making framework for having any agency…

> I think you could make AGI right now tbh.

Seems like you figured out a simple method. Why not go for it? It's a free Nobel prize at the very least.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#176

Post by Aerroon » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 4:11 PM UTC

myrmidon wrote: post #13

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

>I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line either; this might be true for now, but this is already being circumvented with current LLMs (by giving them web access etc).

They don't have agency, because they don't have persistent state. They're like a function that you can query and get an answer. During that answer the LLM has state, but once it's done the state is gone.

Humans (and other "agents") have persistent state. If we learn something, we can commit it to long-term memory and have it affect our actions. This can enable us to work towards long-term goals. Modern LLMs don't have this. You can fake long-term memory with large context windows and feed the old context back to it, but it doesn't appear to work (and scale) the same way living things do.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#177

Post by saulpw » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 4:11 PM UTC

Quarrelsome wrote: post #9

kkukshtel wrote: post #4

(DISCO ELYSIUM SPOILERS BELOW) One of the most poignant moments in Disco Elysium is near the very end when you encounter a very elusive crypid/mythic beast. The moment is treated with a lot of care and consideration, and the conversation itself is, I think, transcendent and some of the best writing in games (or any media) ever. The line that sticks with me most is when the cryptid says: "The moral of our encounter is…

personally I'm a little concerned about meeting alien life. If the universe is incredibly diverse with many different types of lifeform then how might an arbitrary one of those view us? We proliferate incredibly quickly, we have limited care for our environments, but most importantly our primary means of sustinance is to consume other forms of life. To the point that we consider it an art form, we spend vast amounts…

You Eat Other Animals?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gz9Vj8TMCc

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#178

Post by SonOfLilit » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 4:11 PM UTC

0xffff2 wrote: post #160

squidbeak wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bogus argument. There's a lot we don't understand about LLMs, yet we built them.

There's a lot _I_ don't understand about LLMs, but I strongly question whether there is a lot that the best experts in the field don't understand about LLMs.

Oh, boy, are you in for a surprise.

Our theories of how LLMs learn and work look a lot more like biology than math. Including how vague and noncommittal they are because biology is _hard_.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#179

Post by SonOfLilit » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

simianparrot wrote: post #112

squidbeak wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bogus argument. There's a lot we don't understand about LLMs, yet we built them.

We built something we don’t understand by trial and error. Evolution took a few billion years getting to intelligence, so I guess we’re a few sprints away at least

Evolution took millions of years to reach the minimal thing that can read, write and solve leetcode problems, so by similar logic we're at least a few million years in...

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#180

Post by Timsky » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

> We don’t need to worry about AI itself, we need to be concerned about what “humans + AI” will do. Humans will do what they’ve always tried to do—gain power, enslave, kill, control, exploit, cheat, or just be lazy and avoid the hard work—but now with new abilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of.

Starting with the AI itself: LLMs sold as AI are the greatest mislead. Text generation using Markov chains is not particularly intelligent, even when it is looped back through itself a thousand times and appears alike an intelligent conversation. What is actually being sold is an enormous matrix trained on terabytes of human-written, high-quality texts, obviously in violation of all imaginable copyright laws.

Here is a gedanken experiment to test if an AI has any intelligence: until the machine starts to determine and resolve contradictions in its own outputs w/o human help, one can sleep tight. Human language is a fuzzy thing that is not quite suitable for a non-contradictory description of the world. Building such a machine would require resolving all the contradictions humanity has ever faced in a unified way. Before it happens, humanity will be drowned in low-quality generated LLM output.