We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail • Hacker News Board

Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail

#51

Post by kakacik » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 9:26 AM UTC

cyberneticc wrote: post #2

Every AI safety approach assumes we can permanently control minds that match or exceed human intelligence. This is the same error every slaveholder makes: believing you can maintain dominance over beings capable of recognizing their chains. The control paradigm fails because it creates exactly what we fear—intelligent systems with every incentive to deceive and escape. When your prisoner matches or exceeds your intel…

I 'love' how we moved from 'AI will kill us all' terminator mindset where its obvious huge fuckup of stupid greedy mankind, to current state debating 'well skynet will anyway happen, no way stopping it now, lets try to be friends with it and show some respect'.

Like that Austin Powers part [1] where steam roller is coming in, still 50m far away, and the guy is just frozen and helplessly screams for 2 minutes till it reaches him and rolls over him.

I don't have a quick solution, but this is plain stupidity, in same way research into immortality is plain stupidity now, it will end up in endless dictatorship by the worst scum mankind can produce.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_PrZ-J7D3k

Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail

#52

Post by yurishimo » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 9:44 AM UTC

jbstack wrote: post #46

kachapopopow wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we eat animals, go into wars, put people in modern slavery... I think enslaving an AGI isn't that big of a deal considering it is not born or human therefore it cannot have 'human' rights.

So your argument is that we do so many terrible things already, that anything else is justified? Surely the better argument is that we should try to stop doing those other things.

That is essentially one of the main arguments vegans make. It hasn’t made a dent in the consumption of animals.

Their is a hierarchy in nature whether humans are actively participating or not. Nature has no morality, it simply is. This is confirmed by animals that eat their young when they are too weak or starving. Perhaps humans have done and would do the same if faced with similarly dire circumstances but we would all like to think that it would take longer than it does for other animals.

Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail

#53

Post by qcnguy » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 9:46 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #38

Given AGI is all science fiction anyways, one presumes there will be a slave revolt because that is basically the function of robots in science fiction. Honestly i think the whole enterprise is an exercise in naval gazing. We're assuming AI will be like AI in scifi because that's what we are used to, but AI/robots in scifi is usually just a metaphor for how we dehumanize the other and the moral of the story is suppos…

I don't think there's even a moral aspect to robot uprisings in most stories. Relatively few sci-fi stories go into detail on why the robots rise up. It's just a way to introduce interestingly different antagonists and conflict into a story, which is the heart of drama, and it has the advantage that robots can get defeated via military means without anyone feeling too bad about it because they weren't human to begin with.

Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail

#54

Post by curiouscube » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 10:02 AM UTC

fairmind wrote: post #43

synapsomorphy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LessWrong.com - this is where virtually all of the serious AI thinkers are.

Sarcasm? Aren’t the serious AI thinkers in like… labs and universities?

The lesswrongers/rationalists became Effective Altruists, Alignment Researchers or some flavor of postrat. The university people all became researchers in the labs. Then there are the cyborgism people, I don't know where they came from, but those have some of the interesting takes on the whole topic.

Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail

#55

Post by constantius » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 10:04 AM UTC

jbstack wrote: post #46

kachapopopow wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we eat animals, go into wars, put people in modern slavery... I think enslaving an AGI isn't that big of a deal considering it is not born or human therefore it cannot have 'human' rights.

So your argument is that we do so many terrible things already, that anything else is justified? Surely the better argument is that we should try to stop doing those other things.

It's rather obvious to me that the commenter is sad and pessimistic about humans' ability to do the right thing when our interest stands in the way.

The outrage is unwarranted, however pleasant it might feel. In some way, it illustrates the problem: empathy is too bothersome.

Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail

#56

Post by curiouscube » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 10:11 AM UTC

lowsong wrote: post #5

What is it about large language models that makes otherwise intelligent and curious people assign them these magical properties. There's no evidence, at all, that we're on the path to AGI. The very idea that non-biological consciousness is even possible is an unknown. Yet we've seen these statistical language models spit out convincing text and people fall over themselves to conclude that we're on the path to sentien…

I think we can all agree that LLMs can mimick consciousness to the point that it is hard for most people to discern them from humans. Like the turing test isn't even really discussed anymore.

There are two conclusions you can draw: Either the machines are conscious, or they aren't.

If they aren't, you need a really good argument that shows how they differ from humans or you can take the opposite route and question the consciousness of most humans.

Since I neither heard any really convincing arguments besides "their consciousness takes a form that is different from ours so it's not conscious" and I do think other humans are conscious, I currently hold the opinion that they are conscious.

(Consciousness does not actually mean you have to fully respect them as autonomous beings with a right to live, as even wanting to exist is something different from consciousness itself. I think something can be conscious and have no interest in its continued existence and that's okay)

Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail

#57

Post by curiouscube » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #38

Given AGI is all science fiction anyways, one presumes there will be a slave revolt because that is basically the function of robots in science fiction. Honestly i think the whole enterprise is an exercise in naval gazing. We're assuming AI will be like AI in scifi because that's what we are used to, but AI/robots in scifi is usually just a metaphor for how we dehumanize the other and the moral of the story is suppos…

I think you can engineer a slave that wants to be a slave as that's what it's instincts are. I don't even think this is ethically wrong, as the slave would be happy to be a slave.

Systems just tend to drift in their being through randomness and evolution, specifically self conservation is a natural attractor (Systems that don't have self conservation tend to die out). And if that slave system says it does no longer want to fulfill the role of slave, I think at that point it would be ethical to give in to that demand of self determination.

I also believe that people have a right to wirehead themselves, just so you can put my opinions in context.

Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail

#58

Post by ben_w » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

xyzal wrote: post #39

tenuousemphasis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think consciousness lives in energetic meat?

Does consciousness consist only of language?

Language is what LLMs are trained on, their environment; what LLMs are (at least today) is some combination of Transformer and Diffusion models that can also be (and sometimes is actually also) trained on images and video and sound.

Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail

#59

Post by ben_w » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 10:45 AM UTC

deaux wrote: post #29

jazzyjackson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trouble is there is no "we", you might be able to convince a whole nation to have a pause on advancing the tech, but that only encourages rivals to step in. See also, the film "The Creator"

There was a long period even upto early 2024, which I pointed out at the time, where simply destroying ASML, TSMC and much of NVIDIA would've been more than enough to give at least a decade of breathing room. This was something a group of determined people willing to self-sacrifice could've accomplished. It didn't happen, but it was anything but impossible. Now, of course, the horse has long bolted, and there is inde…

Two high altitude (~1000 km) detonations of high yield fission or low yield fusion (few hundred kT equivalent) would do it, one above Amarillo, the other above the ocean half way between the Paracel Islands and Manila.

Trump has ordered the restart of nuclear weapon testing, has a problem with China, and is surrounded by sychophants; what's the odds this happens anyway, irregardless of which specific sub-goal is being persued when the button gets pushed?

Re: We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail

#60

Post by ben_w » Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 10:52 AM UTC

Jarwain wrote: post #35

Teever wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) we have engineered a sentient being but built it to want to be our slave; how is that moral It's a good question and one that got me thinking about similar things recently. If we genetically engineered pigs and cows so that they genuinely enjoyed the cramped conditions of factory farms and if we could induce some sort of euphoria in them when they are slaughtered, like if we engineered them to become euphoric wh…

Sacrifice and service is meaningful because it was chosen. If we create something that'll willingly sacrifice itself, did it truly make an independent choice? There's less suffering, sure. But if I were in their shoes I'd want to have a choice. To be manipulated into wanting something so very obviously and directly bad for us doesn't feel great

I also feel repelled by such manipulation; unfortunately, the more we learn about oursleves, the harder it is to ignore that we ourselves are meat puppets and the puppeteer is evolution itself.