‘The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All’: Anthropic Researcher Quits Dramatically
a month ago by return2ozma to c/technology
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.
And it's fucking exhausting
Sadly I think you're right. We won't be around to see how climate change plays out over the long run bcz we'll start seeing crop failures and our ecosystem collapse will catch up to us. There is and always was a way to stop the worst effects, but we seem hell bent on seeing them through.
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
Air-gapped and in some cases running on hardware that'd be outstripped by an Atari 800.
Our nuclear systems aren't connected to the internet. They are air gapped.
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.
That's how you know it's evil.
That's connection error
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.
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.
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?
See also;
This is just Pascal's wager.
Yep. Same false dichotomy too
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
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.
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.
The cult mechanicus isn't looking so unreasonable now.
Republicans.
I know! Let’s divert energy and resources to torture. That will maximize the benefit of humanity.
- Some brilliant CEO mind
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Roko's Basilisk is stupid.
It presumes three things.
That human beings are logical and that they do anything with intention. For the vast majority of people, this is patently false.
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.
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.
- That human beings are logical and that they do anything with intention. For the vast majority of people, this is patently false.
Absolutelu. That seems to be a frequent misconception, or perhaps just a convenient simplification, for many even highly intelligent people. Even a perfectly logical actor would be prone to error when working with incomplete information and limited capacity for calculating likely outcomes.
And we're not perfectly logical, but subject to whims and emotions, instincts and mental shortcuts. If contributing to a mass murder machine feels wrong, I'm not gonna spend all my energy on trying to estimate whether it would be smarter. I just hope it doesn't happen.
- 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.
Conversely, if it had some drive to wantonly eliminate humans, I doubt that some moral desire to reward those who created it would impede that.
It could just try to eliminate everyone opposing it, as a matter of self-preservation. That would be a justified expenditure of resources. But what happens if it calculates that its creators might also be a threat?
I assume they're expecting they can train it to spare them. Why they think a super-AI would reliably stick to that training is beyond me, but we already established that they might not run on pure logic.
I feel reminded of incidents with supposedly tame beasts suddenly proving why a big cat isn't quite the same as a domestic cat. If you're gonna build a mechanical leopard, expect to get your face eaten.
- That even if 1 and 2 were real, that there's some inherent timeframe in which the AI thinks it should have been created.
And where would it draw the line? Does the plumber that laid pipes in a datacenter count as helping? Does the baker he bought breakfast from every morning count? Is every clerk not directly involved with this enterprise going to be killed?
It just doesn't add up.
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.
Because he want to retire and cash out his equity after vesting in, so he hypes the power of AI out the door and dumps his options.
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.
All of those things make sense when there aren't constant headlines calling the regime you work for evil and pointing out daily all the bad things they are doing.
That's the difference between working for the government during presidents previous to Trump and working for the government now.
There are a lot of things you can do working for the government that in years previous to the cancer currently running the place now could be seen as valuable and important.
Doing research into the effects and safety of drugs, climate change research, allocating public funds to education and the park service etc. Testing food safety.
Those jobs are still important despite the fact that the Cheeto in Chief is wrecking everything he can get his hands on.
At the same time, there's jobs that people do where it's obvious that they are looking to reap benefits now and hoping those benefits will protect them in the future. Press Secretary, Political Advisor, Head of Homeland Security.
There's a line somewhere. Where you might be able to convince yourself that your work is important or meaningful or just plain not evil but you're absolutely not telling people what you do for a living because you know that they won't like it. People don't face backlash for being garbage men or forensic investigators or Hazmat cleanup.
The people building AI are getting a daily dose of the harms that AI causes. This industry popped up basically over night and this isn't a slow burn kind of thing. Its been moving fast and breaking things and ruining lives all in the public eye.
People also view their government as a sort of necessary evil. Psychologically that's different than any random corp.
I think I'm just saying that when you're faced day in and day out with the harm your work is doing, to the point where you recognize and admit it's doing harm, rather than being able to say "my work is insignificant and makes no difference", then rhere has to be something else.
That’s why propaganda is so insidious, it provides an alternate reality for people to inhabit so that they don’t need to believe that they’re on the wrong side. For example, if you are presented with two news stories, each true, with one extolling the benefits of what you do while the other points out the drawbacks, it is very hard to take the latter seriously. We automatically go through some very complex mental gymnastics to prove to ourselves that we are good, that what we are doing is good, and that anyone who doesn’t see that is either misguided or corrupt.
People in the big AI labs can be aware of the environmental harm their products are causing, along with the potential social harms, and even that AI might, at some point in the future, kill off humanity, and still convince themself that their decision to work on it is correct, as long as there is any uncertainty about the problems, and any possible benefits from their work. To be human is to be biased, and no amount of intelligence will inoculate you from it.
"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.
oh yeah, it literally could just be robot dogs with "kill anyone who's an insurgent, and detain anyone who assists insurgents" orders and AI to let them go buck wild with that prompt.
You could end up with children getting shot because an AI starts hallucinating if they don't put adequate guard rails.
And that's like a worst case situation. Realistically, you end up with just a lot more brutality in war because people are detached from the violence they cause as an invading force, and way less PTSD. Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about, and there's way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders.
You could see a fuck load more war crime with such human detachment, I think. We probably already deal with this to a large extent with drones.
Not that I'd prefer humans dying, but we should avoid robotic invasion wars like the plague imo.
Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about
Has this not been the case for the past 25 years already? No real need for "AI" when you already have an obedient and trigger-happy military with plenty of remote-controlled toys and your populace is brainwashed to believe "brown person = terrorist".
way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders
What is the last known case of a US soldier disregarding an unlawful order? If anything, the military is full of assholes who are happy to kill for fun. See: Graham Platner
Will AI make it easier and/or cheaper? Probably, sadly. But it won't be a qualitative change.
People are people. Even soldiers of any nation.
What is the last known case of a US soldier disregarding an unlawful order?
Plenty of such reports from falcon pilots. They're close enough to see the destruction they're causing, so several stories have emerged of pilots calling off attacks
This isn't new. The pilots who flew bombers in WW2 probably killed many more people than the average soldier, but their levels of PTSD were far lower than the guys who had to kill face to face, one at a time.
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/...
- Anthropic Previewing the Model Hardware Standard: https://www.anthropic.com/...
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.
People building AI are in a cult. They have lost all objectivity.
This is just more sales strategy
Really going for that sociopath/pychopath/fascist/nazi/flock demographic.
"We sincerely believe the technology we're building could destroy humanity"
Excellently business strategy
Just another case of genAI psychosis not too dissimilar to the one gøøgle employee who maybe a year or two back thought their genAI was alive. I'm infinitely more worried we will destroy ourselves due to climate change caused by the AI data centers long before genAI even has the ability to think on its own.
Yeah you are not going to get general AI from an LLM. What would destroy the world is people not thinking and letting these LLMs blindly make choices. Oh wait, yeah we might be fucked.
they want what the Matrix was having
Pipes in your neck with black liquid...?
Can mine be mocha?
UBE.
Yes plz
Just don’t pipe it in hot. Known in the state of England to cause cancer.
Yeah except the whole premise of a human being being a battery doesn't make sense. Always makes me laugh how much heavy lifting the line "combined with a form of fusion... the machines had found all the energy they would ever need" does.
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".
The real danger isn't a smart AI - the smartest people don't end up being in charge of our societies. The real danger is having enough control to be able to con most of our society, and seeing how much our societies are willing to continue participating in clearly compromised special interest social networks, I don't have a lot of faith. Barely a difference if humanity is replaced or just led to the lowest common denominator of exploitation at that point, and that's where we are heading politically.
If I were an alien invader, with superior technology, and I was trying to exterminate an indigenous species without getting my hands dirty (or from far away), I might plant something similar to the current LLM/AI + military robots craze.
Distribute free sex robots and humanity would depopulate within two generations. Even better if the humans don’t know they are robots and believe they are an actually human who the humans think they are in a legitimate relationship with. Zero bloodshed takeover.
Blade Runner End Game
There's more than one movie about aliens who use global warming to wipe out humanity. AI data centers seem to be doing just that in more than one way. No need for an alien invader though, even a primitive species adapted for all the nooks and nuances of the environment is far more adept at it, it just needs to be diseased.
I like Blomkamps short, if you haven't seen it check it out.
Consider reading the book "Roadkill", by Dennis E Taylor
Cool thx
There are also rumors, which may be untrue, of a Majestic 12 committee making deals with aliens in exchange for tech. It may be that advances in semi-conductor technology are the "trojan horse," with AI being a natural and probable consequence of that which was genuinely discovered after the chip advances or with AI first being developed by government and then leaked to the public later via papers and then commercially made public, with the end result making the earth uninhabitable for humans. We also don't know if aliens and UFOs are merely biological life/advanced travel or if they are some sort of technological/bio hybrid. It's also possible that these are crazy rumors made up by people who can't fathom science. I understand the statistical and computational logic of AI, so that doesn't seem that crazy to me, but sudden semi-conductor advances seem impossible to fathom; but I could just be ignorant. One flaw in an analysis like this is that even without UFOs, aliens, and computers, humans were doing a great job of exponentially obliterating the normal natural environment just based on pollution emissions from cars and other processes.
Who knows?
I mean let's say we manage to develop advanced AI before we develop ships that can transport humans across the galaxy safely. If we send AI probes to a world like ours with a species like ours how different would their experience be than ours right now? Elite oligarchy enabled by slow drip of advanced tech to consolidate control and then give up agency to AI? Climate change, possibly terra forming against the interests of the target species? Weakened world government and international order to promote discord and violence? Seems a little like we'd follow the playbook the Americans did with their genocide of the natives, divide and conquer. Is there anything happening right now that wouldn't fit that narrative if it was flipped around with us as the target species?
And yet, they just keep going. I will never understand these people.
I genuinely think that they (and conservatives overall) don't understand that everyone is different and that most people aren't our there trying to get one up on everyone else.
100%. Either they don't understand, or they're in on the con.
"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response." - Elon Musk
I'm convinced that he just needed a good ass kicking when he was 18. I think that would have gone a long way towards squashing that overinflated ego.
unfortunately, if you are big enough as a corporation, by definition you are that kind of organization, or you would not be where you are.
we are ruled by sociopaths who crave power wealth and fame. we are doomed.
They are simply not in the same league as Einstein, Oppenheimer and Russel.
I ain't sure they're even in the same league as Ron Popeil.
Ron Popeil
"Popeil received the Ig Nobel Prize in Consumer Engineering in 1993."
For sure.
That's actually pretty interesting. I only knew him for those old RonCo infomercials.
It must be. Because these weird fuckers don't even seem to have hobbies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No amount of financial incentive can convince you to create something that you wholeheartedly believe will destroy you.
Nuclear weapons. Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine.
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
They want that. I watched an interview with Astra Taylor about "end time fascism" in America (and the world).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Ap4RN1Cd0
The narration (only a bit) is in Dutch, but the interview in English
This is excellent. Thank you. And -- holy shit they are insane.
I think it's time to start discussing what steps we can take from this point onward. People are, including myself are tired of being treated like a fucking worm in this system and all I see is unify, let's unify, it's time that we unify... What are the steps we can actually take? I wrote in another topic I can teach people how to go after PayPal and other big tech hypocrites through regulatory bodies that I got positive results from. Let's discuss what we can do destroy the public image of these two faced criminals. They can always earn more money, but you can't buy public image with your money, remember guys.
Actually looking at practical, realistic solutions instead of just targeting whatever company or CEO you've heard bad things about would probably result in better outcomes long term. I see a lot of pure "anti-tech" sentiment around which although understandable isn't really going to fix anything because at the end of the day the technology exists, Pandora's box has been opened and you will always have a share of people who will NOT stop using it, for whatever reason.
If you boycott PayPal it's just going to be replaced by an equivalent service by some other company that might seem better at first but will eventually enshittify like all the other ones. The same could be said about any LLM/AI company. Or any social media company.
I believe to actually "solve" these issues we need regulation. Companies will not stop chasing profits and they won't stop building data centers just because a minority of people on Lemmy really hate it. Humanity will not simply forget that AI exists just because we "collectively" agree to do so. That didn't work for the nuclear bomb or global warming, so why would we expect it to work now? On the other hand, if we actually accept that the tech is there now we can actually invest our energy in making the tech compatible with our society (and the planet).
Deprivatize data centers, put them entirely under government oversight and provide strict environmental regulations. Make AI a public utility and require full transparency from its providers. Finance public research of AI and its effects. We should focus on this unless we want to just see a replay of net neutrality and social media algorithms where the companies responsible for doing a huge amount of damage to our society only get a slap on the wrist 10-15 years from now when everyone has already accepted the idea that you can't have AI without capitalism. Because that idea is exactly the illusion that these companies are trying to sell right now, but it's simply not the truth.
Using regulatory bodies to fine these companies is exactly what I meant in my previous comment if it was not clear. I was able to get some positive results on the way, through the FTC, CFPB, and DFPI just to name a few, and discovered many others who blatantly break the law, including government/political organs such as the European Parliament's ASK EP unit, and the European Banking Authority, SOLVIT not reading complaints properly, etc. If there is a demand, I can make a huge list of regulatory bodies, how to contact them, how to write your complaint legally by citing the law so your complaints are actually taken seriously, and so on. These methods are all free to do and take 10 minutes to fill out per body.
I hope this doesn't come off as rude, but my issue with comments like yours is stating, 'Yeah, we should do something, take the regulatory way!' but it only stays in theory. It never explains the practical steps a user can take. My direct question for you would be: What is a practical step that anyone, or at least most of us, can do as of now?
Most people are screaming into the void. There are countless complaints about PayPal freezing people's accounts without any legal justification, and Google locking people out of their accounts due to 2FA. These are all illegal. For instance, if you are in the EU, you can file a complaint against PayPal through the Central Bank of Ireland, since that's where they hold their license, and with enough volume, you can get their license revoked.
The FTC and consumer protection laws explicitly state that you cannot force a user to prove ownership of their account using only one method. Yet, Google does it. If you lose access to your Patreon account, they ask you weird questions like, 'When was the last time you withdrew your Patreon funds to your PayPal?' Who the heck takes a note of that? If you lose access to your Outlook, Microsoft sends you a form asking for the exact IP address you used to connect to your account.
These are all administrative, illegal barriers. You could be mute, you could be deaf, you are legally not obligated to buy a phone and a SIM card, or maybe you just don't want to talk on the phone, or you have social anxiety. There are solutions out there, and I have gotten results through regulatory complaints many times. Some took a short time, some are still in progress, and I am well aware that for some, I will need to take their asses to court.
Regardless, we need unification, because as I said before, take Irish law for example: if you make a confidential complaint, and unfortunately, filing a complaint against PayPal through Irish regulatory channels falls under this category (I won't dive into the technical details), they can literally say to your face, 'We got your complaint, but cannot share anything further with you.' How is a citizen supposed to know that they actually took action?
The European Parliament is blatantly breaking their own transparency laws. For example, during formal correspondences, their personnel never give out their name to avoid individual liability. I made a post about this today. You can start a petition against this directly inside the EP (This can be done online too! For free!), and take this matter to the ECJ (this one is a bit tricky, because you need a literal lawyer for this). You wrote to Amnesty, who claims to defend human rights, and didn't get a response from them? There are government bodies investigating this shit, but the information is not easily accessible. At best, it is written in such a way that it is very easy to get confused about how to file the complaint. If government is not making it easy for us to access these info, we MUST make it easy for others depending on our knowledge, so everyone knows they have places to go and file complaints and their voices to be heard. Practical steps.
Complaining anywhere, be it on Lemmy or another social media platform, will not change anything. At least not with 200 people. People need to get their asses off the couch and start filing legal complaints, and protest if necessary; flood social media one by one against whoever is breaking the law, EVERY SINGLE GOD DAMN THEY until we get the results, so that big tech cannot even censor this shit even if they wanted to. The issue always relies on people being unhappy but not taking action, even if it means filling out a simple form.
I do understand that we are constantly pumped with, 'Ah, nothing is gonna change even if I complain.' The thing is, yeah, it will not if we scream into the void. We gotta complain legally by directly citing the law, which I can help with and create guidelines for, since all of these companies break very specific laws every single time. For example, Epic Games, Bandcamp support, Patreon, Ubisoft, any gamer knows about these companies, and these are all breaking transparency laws by not sharing personnel names with you, the moment you contact their support channels. They also force you to use webforms, so they can get rid of that paper trail, if you decide to file a complaint against them later, just to name a few.
If there is a demand, I wouldn't mind sitting down all day and creating a detailed guide on which regulatory body you can go to, how to file your complaint, and how to do it. What would you suggest doing practically, for example? Any ideas are welcome, we can always iterate, and someone else can come up with something better, but we do need to start taking action at this point.
We gotta start taking these actions in volume, not just a few people.
A bit of background story on how I got involved in all of this, if you are wondering: I was living in Mannheim, Germany previously, and was kidnapped and assaulted by the Polizeirevier Neckarstadt-Mannheim police department, who literally dumped me onto the street after the kidnapping with nothing. No IDs, no glasses, no shoes, no underwear, no keys, nothing. I got my official assault report, literally stating everything I say here is correct; medical personnel called the police station, confirmed I was there, and put it on the official assault report that I was indeed dumped onto the street without my glasses or shoes.
When I was in the cell, these police officers forced me to sign a paper, which I did not, and they threatened me that they would come to my home again, which they did. I recorded where they could not show any IDs, could not state any legal grounds for why they were in my bedroom, and so on. You know what happened when I tried to take this matter to court? NOTHING. German judges did not even start the court case. These same police officers stole my phone on the first day where I recorded all of their hate crimes, which I proved with GPS logs and direct satellite recordings, but nothing has happened. These things happened on June 26 and 27, 2026. No investigation, no nothing.
I am coming from a military background, so I know my rights and I knew what to do in a stressful situation like this. But what about other immigrants? When you share these stories, people look at you like you're an alien, or when you complain about how PayPal isn't giving you your own money, they immediately switch to, 'Forget about that money, you'll never get it back,' which honestly disappoints me, seeing how easily people can be tricked by the government.
There is so much we can do. There are many people here from so many different fields and areas of expertise; we could really ignite something that could lead to something big. Nobody needs to go through what I went through, and I bet you also went through some shitty situations where you knew you were wronged, but the system left you alone, or wasn't there as much as it actually could be. I don't want anyone to feel this way.
Here's how this should have been handled, from day 1:
Upon releasing GPT-3, the then president Biden declares an emergency, and sends the military after Altman and his cohorts to arrest them. Then Biden declares he stopped the end of civilization, AI research gets shut down, the slop machine gets killed in its cradle. The men on the top get executed, no second thoughts, they said it is so dangerous it could end civilization.
It can be used to kill, same way a calculator does.
if you were locked in a building with psychopaths building a nuclear bomb, are you certain you would be strong enough to stick around? especially since Terry from engineering shot himself five times in the back of the head last week.
I wouldn't put one in charge of a water treatment plant or a set of traffic lights, but even if it stuffed up and killed people, the responsibility would still not be the AI's. The responsibility would lie with those who built it, trained it, and prompted it, just as, if a bunch of people are fried by a nuclear missile, the responsibility lies with the person who pushed the button rather than with the missile itself. It's a piece of software. It does what it's told. It may be complex enough to display unexpected emergent behaviour, but so is Dwarf Fortress. Any destruction it accomplishes is just the real-world version of !!Fun!!, disgusting concept though that may be.
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?
If they ever make a docudrama about AI like The Social Network, Matthew Rhys is a lock for Dario Amodei.
They should cast Jesse Plemons as Amodei. He would absolutely boss it
We don't have to let it, but we probably will anyway. There are a ton of people trying to push some crazy revelations end times scenario on us.
I've said for a long time my retirement plan is there won't be one, and it's starting to seem like that's really going to happen, just not in the way I imagined. We live in the absolute stupidest timeline right now.
“The people building [data centers] earnestly believe that [they] could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote in that same post.
FTFY
If i figure out i am building my own gallows, believe me, I am done building. These AI propagating people are legitimately morons. Super glad we get to cohabitate this spacetime with them.
People still talking as if AI is sentient.
Everybody is in competition with each other. We can only stop if we can convince everybody else to stop too. If these truly are weapons of mass destruction, no country wants to be the only one without it.
Just don't use chatbots or image generators and you're fine.
This guy quit dramatically, others haven't slammed their jobs yet, and even if countries agree to limits, will their militaries and businesses? Some countries won't agree, and at the rate they say it's approaching danger, may not slow it much from job defection. Could ask an llm to estimate what % of talent loss could impede its progress to take over.
Ask an L l m,
Estimate what percent to,
Stop its take over
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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".
save