321–330 of 343 posts
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There's always a CEO or a president. The buck always stops somewhere. Somebody is always making the big bucks because they are in charge.
For legally incorporated companies. What if it's just a crypto wallet hooked up to a network of prompts? Are you sure a human must have created it?
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For legally incorporated companies. What if it's just a crypto wallet hooked up to a network of prompts? Are you sure a human must have created it?
Somebody is collecting those funds. Someone wrote those prompts. There's always a human to blame somewhere.
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Somebody is collecting those funds. Someone wrote those prompts. There's always a human to blame somewhere.
I'm not aware of any counter-example, but I also don't know any reason why this must be true. And furthermore, I would expect that this will get more likely over time.
Maybe in the distant sci-fi future we'll have actual AI (not just glorified chatbots) and AI will be able to decide for itself what it wants to do with its time and we'll be allowing AI to sign leases on property and set up accounts with utility companies, and if that day comes we're going to have a lot of problems if we're not ready for it, but until then it's AI on a human's hardware at a human's property running up a human's electric bill.
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While scary, information like this has been pretty accessible for 20-30 years now. In the wild west days of the early internet, there were whole forums devoted to "stuff the government doesn't want you to know" (Temple Of The Screaming Electron, anyone?). I suppose the friction is scariest part, every year the IQ required to end the world drops by a point, but motivated and mildly intelligent people have been able to…
Much longer than that, and was available way before an internet. I graduated STEM high school in St. Petersburg in 1981, and I had several classmates who were big funs of chemistry. That they were able to create from textbooks, school lab ingredients, and understanding: WWI era poison gas, tear gas, potassium cyanide, and bunch of explosives like acetone peroxide. LLMs have all of that knowledge in training data
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I'm not aware of any counter-example, but I also don't know any reason why this must be true. And furthermore, I would expect that this will get more likely over time.
It's possible, in theory, that an AI could establish a crypto wallet, but what would they do with it? AI doesn't have desires. It doesn't do what it isn't told to do (although those instructions can be broad and vague). Even if an AI did somehow do something bad without being told, that AI would still be set up by a human and running on some human's hardware and using a human's internet connection. Maybe in the dista…
It won't need to sign a lease to do any of this. It doesn't even require desires. I'm not sure why it seems so far fetched to you.
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Doesn't google facilitate all those things? Doesn't internet itself facilitate?
the information is not new. how easy it is to get step by step instructions is new. Try it yourself. Google is good but not instant, step by step good. you need to do your own research that takes time. time that anti-terrorist units use to track you down. now this time factor is very limited you don't need to do research, cross reference materials, sources, etc. LLM does it for you. a research that could take days is…
Speaking from the perspective of a USian, I wish Federal law enforcement was that hypercompetent. (If they were, perhaps folks would stop to question the ever-broader expansion of 24/7 surveillance of ordinary folks.)
The distressingly-complete Panopticon that has been built over the past several decades [0] makes it really easy for them to get you when they know to search for you, specifically. History (both recent and not-so-recent) has shown that if they don't know who they're looking for, or don't even know that they should be looking for anyone, they're just godawful.
[0] ...and whose continued construction is vociferously cheered on by folks on all sides of all of the aisles...
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> been pretty accessible for 20-30 years now. There was this book 20 years ago: "Secret of Methamphetamine Manufacturing" by Uncle Fester https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Uncle-Fester-ebook/dp/B00305GTWU (Actually, 8th edition :-D)
I am convinced the Uncle Fester books are some kind of performance art. "Practical LSD Manufacture" basically starts with "go find some ergot in fields" and step two is "plant and grow a plot of wheat."
C.f., e.g., William Powell (The Anarchist Cookbook), Abbie Hoffman (Steal This Book; my personal favorite, while much of the information is outdated, the style is charming, and where else can you find information about phone phreaking, hitchhiking, shoplifting, street fighting, cooking (food, not drugs), panhandling, explosives, camping, firearms, birth control, welfare fraud, and Henry Kissinger's home phone number between the same two covers? At its core, it's a book of "life hacks", disreputable and otherwise, written decades before the term was coined.).
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> what you are saying is we can expect the number of accidental home-made chlorine-gas (and the like) toxic events go up Maybe? One of the quirks of gaining even a surface-level understanding of infrastructure is realising how vulnerable it is to a smart, motivated adversary. The main thing protecting us isn't hard security. It's most Americans having better shit to do than running a truck of fertiliser and oxidiser…
> It's most Americans having better shit to do than running a truck of fertiliser and oxidiser into a pylon. FWIW, it's most people having better shit to do, regardless of nationality (or lack thereof). But, yeah, anyone who takes a few weekends to understand how large-scale infrastructure works and consider why it's possible for nearly all of it to remain untargeted by saboteurs inevitably develops a resistance to t…
Same goes for concerts, sporting events, political rallies, and at least historically, shopping malls. Yet if anyone were to suggest a prohibition against carrying liquids in containers larger than 100 mL to the Indy 500, race fans would riot, despite a far larger and denser population than any aircraft.
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the information is not new. how easy it is to get step by step instructions is new. Try it yourself. Google is good but not instant, step by step good. you need to do your own research that takes time. time that anti-terrorist units use to track you down. now this time factor is very limited you don't need to do research, cross reference materials, sources, etc. LLM does it for you. a research that could take days is…
> time that anti-terrorist units use to track you down. Speaking from the perspective of a USian, I wish Federal law enforcement was that hypercompetent. (If they were, perhaps folks would stop to question the ever-broader expansion of 24/7 surveillance of ordinary folks.) The distressingly-complete Panopticon that has been built over the past several decades [0] makes it really easy for them to get you when they kno…