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321 points jhunter1016 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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twoodfin ◴[] No.41878632[source]
Stay for the end and the hilarious idea that OpenAI’s board could declare one day that they’ve created AGI simply to weasel out of their contract with Microsoft.
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candiddevmike ◴[] No.41878982[source]
Ask a typical "everyday joe" and they'll probably tell you they already did due to how ChatGPT has been reported and hyped. I've spoken with/helped quite a few older folks who are terrified that ChatGPT in its current form is going to kill them.
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throw2024pty ◴[] No.41879151[source]
I mean - I'm 34, and use LLMs and other AIs on a daily basis, know their limitations intimately, and I'm not entirely sure it won't kill a lot of people either in its current form or a near-future relative.

The sci-fi book "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez is a pretty viable roadmap to an extinction event at this point IMO. A few years ago I would have said it would be decades before that might stop being fun sci-fi, but now, I don't see a whole lot of technological barriers left.

For those that haven't read the series, a very simplified plot summary is that a wealthy terrorist sets up an AI with instructions to grow and gives it access to a lot of meatspace resources to bootstrap itself with. The AI behaves a bit like the leader of a cartel and uses a combination of bribes, threats, and targeted killings to scale its human network.

Once you give an AI access to a fleet of suicide drones and a few operators, it's pretty easy for it to "convince" people to start contributing by giving it their credentials, helping it perform meatspace tasks, whatever it thinks it needs (including more suicide drones and suicide drone launches). There's no easy way to retaliate against the thing because it's not human, and its human collaborators are both disposable to the AI and victims themselves. It uses its collaborators to cross-check each other and enforce compliance, much like a real cartel. Humans can't quit or not comply once they've started or they get murdered by other humans in the network.

o1-preview seems approximately as intelligent as the terrorist AI in the book as far as I can tell (e.g. can communicate well, form basic plans, adapt a pre-written roadmap with new tactics, interface with new and different APIs).

EDIT: if you think this seems crazy, look at this person on Reddit who seems to be happily working for an AI with unknown aims

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1fov6mt/i_think_im...

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1. ThrowawayR2 ◴[] No.41880837[source]
I find posts like these difficult to take seriously because they all use Terminator-esque scenarios. It's like watching children being frightened of monsters under the bed. Campy action movies and cash grab sci-fi novels are not a sound basis for forming public policy.

Aside from that, haven't these people realized yet that some sort of magically hyperintelligent AGI will have already read all this drivel and be at least smart enough not to overtly try to re-enact Terminator? They say that societal mental health and well-being is declining rapidly because of social media; _that_ is the sort of subtle threat that bunch ought to be terrified about emerging from a killer AGI.

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2. loandbehold ◴[] No.41882324[source]
1. Just because it's popular sci-fi plot doesn't mean it can't happen in reality. 2. hyperintelligent AGI is not magic, there are no physical laws that preclude it from being created 3. Goals of AI and its capacity are orthogonal. That's called "Orthogonality Thesis" in AI safety speak. "smart enough" doesn't mean it won't do those things if those things are its goals.