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”.
Just don’t use chatbots or image generators and you’re fine.
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?
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.
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.
If both those premises hold
You’re just doing Pascal’s Wager For Computers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People building AI are in a cult. They have lost all objectivity.
If they ever make a docudrama about AI like The Social Network, Matthew Rhys is a lock for Dario Amodei.
They are and Andrew Garfield is playing Sam Altman. Don’t know if Amodei will be in it.
They should cast Jesse Plemons as Amodei. He would absolutely boss it
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.
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!
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
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…
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.
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.
Those systems are supposed to be air-gapped.
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.
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.
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.
It can be used to kill, same way a calculator does.
“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.
“Hey, baby. Wanna kill all humans?”
– Bender
