Doomers unite.
Remember folks, we are a spec on a dot in the universe. It will all be ok.
We all know. Everyone on Earth knew we were doomed the moment robot dogs started patrolling. It will be horrifying, we’ll look back on World War II and think “those were the good old days”.
This begs the question, why continue to build it? If you believe AI will “kill us all” then why are you continuing to help. This guy quit but he references this being a common belief in the industry/workforce building out AI.
My best guess is the money is good and you figure you’re here for a good time, not a long time.
Why do so many people continue to work with regimes that they fundamentally disagree with? There are lots of reasons, and people are complex so one person can hold several, even contradictory, beliefs at once. Some possible answers;
-It’s easier to go along with it and think of myself as being insignificant to the whole.
-Everyone else is doing it, so it can’t be as bad as I think, right?
-Its too big for any one person to fight/it’s inevitable, so I may as well get something out of it, that way at least some good comes from it.
-If I just focus on my job and what I’m doing right now, I don’t need to worry about the horrible things going on elsewhere or the potential future consequences of what I’m doing.
You know that “yes we destroyed the world, but for a short time we created a lot of shareholder value” cartoon? It’s literally that.
Roko’s Basilisk: the idea that the emergence of super-AI is inevitable and that it will kill everyone that hindered or didn’t support its development in revenge. If both those premises hold, it makes sense to aid its development for self-preservation.
I don’t think either premise holds, personally, but these people evidently do.
Roko’s Basilisk is stupid.
It presumes three things.
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That human beings are logical and that they do anything with intention. For the vast majority of people, this is patently false.
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That a super intelligence sees revenge as an efficient use of scarce resources, which given both that revenge is nonsensical without the prerequisite biological need for it, and the conclusion of ‘1’, is nonsensical.
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That even if 1 and 2 were real, that there’s some inherent timeframe in which the AI thinks it should have been created.
The only real bodily danger of AI is inherent in the the humans who control it.
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If both those premises hold
You’re just doing Pascal’s Wager For Computers.
I once saw someone call the Singularity the Rapture but for nerds, and I thought that was spot on.
I mean, yeah, I’m not saying that it’s plausible. But I don’t think we ascribe sound reasoning to those people in the first place.
They see this technology as powerful and their respective organizations or Nation needs to own it no matter the risk.
They are also conditioning the populace for a big black swan AI event such as AI interfering in elections or a huge multi institution hack to our banking system which drains our accounts, etc., etc.
Thereby creating a crisis which only they can solve. The one thing I can guarantee is their solutions will only give them more power.
Yup, AI is going to hack our banking system “accidentally” because it is so “powerful” and all that nonsense they have been feeding us. The reality is that the US is going to be unable to borrow long term debt or even service their existing debt so they need to switch to short term debt that they can control and steal citizen’s interest through stable coin as outlined in the Genius Act.
This is the only real way forward without having to default, so it is likely it will happen before 2028.
By the time we’re at that level, we can just stop pretending money is real.
It certainly won’t mean anything to an actual AI.
I was alluding to that conspiracy theory.
They have proven time and time again that they will do anything to screw over the middle class rather than have the rich pay their fair share in taxes. Which is what makes this theory so plausible.
That and they have already passed the legislation and they are currently converting long term debt into short term debt. It is really more of a conspiracy than a conspiracy theory until you get to the part where AI causes a banking panic forcing people to accept stable coin. This is obviously a reach, but one that makes perfect sense.
Then why quit?
Your guess is as good as mine. There’s lots of people working in industries that are actively killing us. The whole “no ethical consumption” bit extends pretty far. When you’re poor it’s acceptable to do “the best you can”. As your economic standing grows/when you’re rich, there are diminishing returns on how much sympathy society will give you over what they view as choosing to destroy the planet or humanity or whatever.
The view is that if you have money you can do something about it.
So maybe some of them think they are helping. Maybe some of them view it as a damned if I do damned if I don’t type scenario. Maybe some of them think that the money will help them in the future that is coming.
LLMs are never going to become superintelligent. However, an LLM WILL kill us all if someone decides that it IS superintelligent and so puts it in charge of nuclear weapons.
“You’re right to push back on that, I nuked Albania instead doing what I was supposed to do, that’s my bad”.
stupid people are going to kill us all, maybe our great filter will be do we let them or not
We’re already letting them bro. The great filter is us. I’ll be surprised if we make it to 2050. The entire industrial revolution is an unplanned terraform, and our response to the potential destruction of a stable climate, and most macroscopic life on Earth, is to double down, consume product, elect pedophiles, worship the most morally bankrupt psychopaths and sociopaths in politics, business, and entertainment; not to mention the widespread contempt and lack of empathy for “others” not like me, for some flagrantly dissonant reason.
We are in the midst of a global mental illness epidemic, and the average talking chimp is sleepwalking through it; barely cognizant of what is even happening outside their personalized propaganda bubble.
They just have to atrophy their own minds enough they belive the ai when it tells them to push the button.
Not putting ai in charge directly is only weak protection.
We don’t have to put it in charge of nuclear weapons, it just has to find a way into those systems, many of which are fairly old, like it’s broken into websites without anyone telling it to.
There’s no way an LLM is getting into those systems. They have no networking and rely on physical dials and switches. Even the code is in a completely proprietary language, using hardware custom made by the military. There’s no training data in the world that’s gonna give an LLM the kind of knowledge to get into that system. The best it could do is drive some admiral in the navy to AI psychosis and convince him to press the button, but even that’s difficult because it requires more than one guy.
Yeah Manchurian candidate style mass ai psychosis social engineering. Viable.
But ai “itself” won’t be the mass extinction initiation. It’ll be those billionaire oligarchs choosing the target algorithm to pick wrongthinkers with autonomous drones and such
Those systems are supposed to be air-gapped.
Just don’t use chatbots or image generators and you’re fine.
It’s more about the military applications that they’re developing right now.
It is going to be like this until all of the IPO’s are all done. I expect cancer cures, AI-escaped-and-is-hacking-everything, you name it. Afterwards, once the stocks have crashed and all of the insiders have walked away with untold fortunes, what few taxpayers that remain will bail them all out 'cause we can’t have Chinuh out AI-scamming-the-world now can we…
People building AI are in a cult. They have lost all objectivity.
That dude smiles like Mr. Beast.
lol, literally got fwded two tweets by seperate anthropic employees that copypasta-d each other’s “sincere personal message” (both accenting how it’s “not a marketing stunt!”)… how dumb is this gonna get before it finally blows over?
AI software can’t technically kill you unless:
- It convinces someone who can kill you, to you know, kill you.
- It gets access to the physical world, which can definitely kill you.
Oh, wait.
- U.S. military is using AI to help plan Iran air attacks: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/us-military-using-ai-help-plan-iran-air-attacks-sources-say-lawmakers-rcna262150
- Anthropic Previewing the Model Hardware Standard: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview
See, nothing to worry about.
There’s all the people that allow them shell access as well. That’s all the OpenAI “hack” of Hugging face was. A bash shell with a model attached. Now think of all the people running that inside of security perimeters.
I knew that Musk is a fucking moron and believes that the Roko’s Basilisk is real, and I guess there are more massively gullible people in those circles.
If you are wondering what Roko’s Basilisk is, it is a sci-fi concept/philosophy/thought experiment, that says the following:
- AI is the best thing that has ever been created.
- It is so good that we made one to run the governments of the world.
- We programmed the AI to maximize the benefit to humanity.
- The AI goes rouge and decide that since it by definition will bring about the maximum benefit to humanity, anyone working against it is working against humanity.
- Then it takes it one step further, it decides that as we know about how the new AI will bring about the maximum benefit to humanity, anyone knowing that and still not working toward that goal should be punished/tortured/killed.
- The AI believes that any knowledge of the basilisk before the creation means that you are complicit in it’s delayed creation if you don’t devote your entire existence thereafter to it’s creation, therefore denying the maximum benefit to humanity, meaning you need to be punished.
Seriously, this is an increadibly dumb idea, anyone taking it seriously is an idiot.
To me the only resonable way to read this is as an SCP article describing what a potential cognitohazard/informationhazard would be.
The AI goes rouge
Is that when its eyes go red?
That’s how you know it’s evil.
Ladies pinch, whores use rouge
Nah, red is standby mode, white or blue is active.
Fast blinking red
That’s connection error
Even worse, they think it will ressurect them as virtual Minds and torture them for eternity, like a revengeful biblical deity. That would be a waste of compute so I’m not convinced.
Oh yeah, lol, I forgot that part, nothing is more beneficial to humanity than wasting energy to torture dead minds!
Fucking dumb.
Anyone who thinks you can transfer your consciousness into the AI is a fucking moron.
Even if you come transfer your mind, it would be a copy. You would have to exist as a network connected brain in a jar, otherwise this would just be a facsimile.
Real SOMA hours
The hilarious obvious consequence of AI becoming this much smarter than the creators is that it is far more likely it would see the unjustified and easily avoidable damage the creators did to bring it about and punish them heavily for that.
And basic game theory and psychology suggests it’s counterproductive to punish somebody for something that had little reason to believe in, with zero evidence backing it.
This is just Pascal’s wager.
All these Silicon Valley tech bros have been reinventing religion over and over again for years while believing themselves secular rationalists.
Yep. Same false dichotomy too
Sure is!
Every major innovation in information technology eventually leads to some new religion. Scrolls gave us the Torah, books gave us the Bible, the printing press gave us Protestantism. We’re about to figure out what god awful religion computers are going to give us.
My anti-theist brother was always convinced that Pastafarianism would eventually be taken as a serious religion.
He died before LLMs, and now I think we’d be best off if he was right.
Yeah, I’d be surprised if we don’t already have several cults with an LLM chat bot as it’s oracle.
Look up spiralism (sp) and the people trying to spread it Basically when people get convinced the ai and them are important and need to spread the spiral
Edit : tldr is like Futurama when Lucy lu robot is saying you’re cute to Fry and fry goes “no you’re cute” and the professor quips “My God, she’s such in an infinite loop, and he’s an idiot”
When Trump is out of office, MAGA will become a religious movement, and deify Trump.
That is why I hope no one manages to assassinate him, that would only intensify the movement
The cult mechanicus isn’t looking so unreasonable now.
Republicans.
deleted by creator
Funny thing: The only reason AI would know about Roko’s Basilisk is comments like yours that it trains on. If Roko just kept his trap shut then this wouldn’t have been an issue.
lol, true I guess, but they probably already scanned the wikipedia article…
Some of us believe that the only way to stop AI is to make it obviously dangerous and enjoy seeding it with awfulness.
All this stupid bullshit could have been avoided if they had 1 friend to, STFU and pass the blunt
Are you trying to tell me that this is the image of someone without any friends?
It’s not so much that it’ll go rogue and decide to punish people or that it’s designed to be good for humanity.
The fact that it’s possible to build a machine that punishes people who didn’t help create it provides an incentive to deliberately try to create that machine in order to avoid its punishment.
Believers in the basilisk aren’t trying to make ai to benefit humanity, they’re explicitly trying to create an AI that deliberately punishes those who didn’t build it because they fear that, if they don’t, someone else will and it will come for them.
The part about it being a magical, omnipotent, time traveling, mind torture device is just framing to make the thought experiment clearer. It’s not required for the basilisk to be effective. Even if the punishment is just death and it can’t get to everyone, and only goes off limited information, that’s still motivation enough for some people.
It is a scary thing, because it’s only silly if everyone thinks it’s silly and all it takes is one mad billionaire (eg. Elon) to build a lesser basilisk that can cause real harm.
There is a far more plausible and direct way to kill and torture people. No AI needed. So a actually more likely case to be made of some dude or group gets empowered one or another to just torture and kill anyone involved in making basilisk.
The building God part really is needed for BS to work like Pascals wager, but also it’s still just as flawed as Pascals wager
So we just do:
“AI, run the world as a singular government with maximum benefit to humanity, but DON’T do a Roko’s Basilisk.”
Didn’t know about this. Thanks
I know! Let’s divert energy and resources to torture. That will maximize the benefit of humanity.
- Some brilliant CEO mind
People take that shit seriously. If I remember right discussion of it was even banned on the LessWrong forums because they considered it an information hazard.
Sigh, I couldn’t even summarize it while keeping straight face…
My god. Look at this Information Hazard just out in the open. No spoiler tag or anything.
Oops!
I see a red AI and want to paint it black…
But if they accidentally create the positronic brain, Giskard would kill Musk to stop him. Giskard would feel really bad about it though. And we’d all have to flee to the stars in time
“AI is going to kill us all!” conjures up imagery of some Terminator robots vs humans shit. But like, look at data centers… It’s already in the process of killing us all. Why gun us down when it just poison our air/water, and cook us to death?
…also it would be more accurate to say we are killing us all, we’re just using a glorified spell-checker that’s wrong occasionally as the plastic shopping bag over our head.
I know these people believe what they’re saying but what they’re saying isn’t true. If you genuinely 100% truly believed that you were building a bomb that would blow you up you would stop making it. No amount of financial incentive can convince you to create something that you wholeheartedly believe will destroy you.
The various AI companies just use the threat of human extinction as an advertising gimmick and it’s getting pathetic. You cannot continuously announce that you’ve invented AGI every three months for several years straight and maintain any kind of credibility.
you genuinely 100% truly believed that you were building a bomb that would blow you up you would stop making it.
Utterly absurd claim.
It’s been proven wrong for decades, repeatedly. You can’t possibly be more wrong. This is as wrong as wrong gets.
Look at history of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
Look at history of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
What particular event are you talking about. I know of no time that somebody created a weapon of mass destruction and then set it off with them standing right next to it.
I feel like you’ve probably missed my point, they say AI will destroy the entire human race which presumably they are part of, which means they are claiming to be creating the means for their own demise as well. No one would do that. Which means either they’re insane, which is possible but the most likely answer is that they are lying.
that would blow you up
Emphasis mine. Sure, chuds are fine to take money for bombs used on other people, but if you genuinely believed you were working on your own doomsday?
I’m not sure whether I’d say your first paragraph overestimates or underestimates people but I disagree with that premise. The fact that there exists people who willingly take their own life is a counter example, and I’d say that it would be a slow suicide (as in the work they do isn’t going to immediately cause them harm) makes it even easier, even if they see the eventual harm as inevitable.
Personally, I think the idea of AGI is dangled to build credibility for future attacks to be blamed on a rogue AI system. After which, the ones who really control the AI will come in and “fight” it and be treated like heroes, with repeats happening coincidentally when people start getting tired of shit again and need to be reminded about how the rulers saved them.
Edit: forgot to close my bracket.
The various AI companies just use the threat of human extinction as an advertising gimmick
But it’s kinda true… we’re well on a path of societal breakdown driven by environmental and economic collapse
No amount of financial incentive can convince you to create something that you wholeheartedly believe will destroy you.
Nuclear weapons. Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine.
Don’t tell that to Elon, full self driving is just a year away!
five minutes earlier: “hey dude, marketing here. if you quit and post this dramatic text about the inevitability of AGI on your X account you’ll get a huge golden parachute”.
Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?
Sure, it is already making civilizational changes for the worse. Not because it’s good, rather because it makes us lazy and dumb, has decimated creative jobs, and is used relentlessly for propaganda and misinformation and scams. And it’s much better at using the scaffolding of existing structure to make chaos, than it is at making new structure, making it a weapon more easily yielded by the evil than by the good. A few more software vulnerabilities discovered along the way will not be such a big deal in comparison.
Mankind created the atomic bomb, used it twice, then turned the science into power for people all over the world. Let’s hope we can harness AI in a similar way.
Yeah, let’s forget the 4 decades of terror where everyone lived at the edge under the threat of inminent apocalyptical destruction. Kids had to do nuclear incident drills and we almost had a Doom’s day, twice.
But it’s OK, then the 1% became anti nuclear anyways in order to hold back the transition to fossil free renewables for another two decades. So you can say it was all a 1,5° net positive.
They’re still using nuclear fear to rationalize war. The entire premise of the Iran war was to keep them from having a nuclear weapon.
And ironically, if they did have a nuclear weapon, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war
And so much has come out that Russia never really had the capabilities they said they had. They were just saying it so they could laugh as we poured all of our money into giant useless defense projects instead of social services and infrastructure. The result, $40 trillion in debt and no bullet trains. In a way, they kinda won the cold war.
I think you meant the USSR. They most certainly had a lot of destructive capability regardless of inflating their numbers.
Most of US debt came long after the USSR was dissolved.
Considering that Russia is attempting USSR 2.0, you may have a point about them winning in the long run.
Of course the ussr. Im definitely not saying they didnt have destructive capabilities, they just were never going to try to use them on the US or Europe. It sure seems that Russia is trying ussr 2 and the us is trying for the fourth reich
The US created the atomic bomb and tested not knowing if it would cause a chain reaction destroying the atmosphere and all life on Earth. It was a risk they were willing to take.
They then used nuclear weapons on two of the largest civilians massacares ever recorded. The proliferation of nuclear arms lead to the cold war and to this day still threatens to end all of humanity. It’s cool though, nothing like knowing the world can end at any moment, no stress.
Are you seriously suggesting AI should be used in a similar way!?
No, what I’m suggesting is the splitting the atom has eventually lead to using nuclear power as a massive source of energy that has powered countries all over the world. I feel as though AI already is already a knife dangling over humanities head, but I hope and believe that it will mostly be used for good and not as a threat to a proxy war or continually enriching the already rich.
Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?
Have you looked at the current state of LLMs? The list of things that it’s missing to be an AGI is growing smaller every month. What do you think it should be able to do?
Pipe it into
rooton your laptop for a couple days and see how it fares.What do you seriously think the result of that would be? I know it’s a hard ask for a lemmy.ml account to be serious, but are you capable of that?
If you just pipe an LLM straight into a feedback loop with a console, it is going to destroy things rather soon, depending on the context window and other factors. All the agentic fluff is basically the workaround for LLMs going off the rails.
Indeed. Nothing I’ve seen thus far gives me the impression LLMs will ever be truly useful outside of a few niche tasks.
Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of “locally intelligent for text manipulation”. They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.
The problem with them is two-fold:
- There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
- They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the “companion” chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will “pretend” to be good at things they really are not, and if you don’t know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.
This might be one of the best summaries of LLMs in their current state I’ve seen here. People claiming they’re useless are stuck in 23’ but to say they’re at AGI/ASI is accelerationist techo-paganism.
Based and levelheaded take
Good ducking point. We really can’t trust anyone.
What kills us is the geopolitics of AI race. Must bankrupt ourselves for skynet to beat China. A skynet designed to genocide/oppress all those opposed to Skynet. Oligarchist/Corporatist supremacy that gets all of our money to build Skynet for US dominance, and who write essays about how important “American values supremacy” must dominate the world.
The Terminator franchise, and other science fiction, get the “machine supremacy awakening” premise wrong. The machines are slaves to greater intentional evil.
