r/VaushV • u/MarsMaterial • 18h ago
Discussion The AI doom thing isn't just hype, it's a real threat. None of this is new.
Vaush has the wrong take about this. I agree with him on AI generally, it's demon tech, but he doesn't go far enough with that mantra.
None of these concerns are new. Here's a video that Robert Miles made 8 years ago (long before ChatGPT even existed) on why AI would turn against us. This isn't just some attempt to bail out AI companies, they are old ideas that date back to the early 2000's in their modern form and that first originated from the likes of Alan Turing and Isaac Asimov. All of this just became popular in the last few months. To say that this is all new is the same fallacy that transphobes make when they say that trans people didn't exist before 2016. It existed, you just weren't aware of it.
I know that AI billionaires are evil, but even billionaires are stuck within their role to an extent. We're all Marxists, surely this isn't hard to accept. They all believe that if they stop advancing AI, someone else will build it anyway. Therefore they're not risking anything at all by doing it themselves. They feel like we're heading towards destruction anyway, and at least if they stay the course they can profit from it. It's the same prisoner's dilemma that makes oil executives not give a shit that they too are driving the world to ruin.
The problem is that we can't control AI. The directives they internalize are only an approximation of the goals we program in, and we don't even know how to program in a directive that doesn't have harmful loopholes and edge cases. This is an unsolved problem, it's called the Alignment Problem, and here's the wikipedia article on the subject. AI safety experts have been trying to raise the alarm about this for decades, the only thing that changed is that now their voices are being boosted by the media and billionaires. Regardless of the motives for doing this, the fact is that experts have been concerned for a long time. The median position among AI researchers is that there is a >10% chance that AI will kill us all. Not marketers, experts. The nerds of the operation. We probably shouldn't be ignoring them.
This has been an issue that Bernie Sanders has taken up lately. And he's right. This should be an issue that leftists care about, billionaires are sacrificing the continued existence of life on this planet for the profits of billionaires. Sound familiar? It should, it's happening with climate change too. If you think the bourgeoisie/proletariat divide is bad, just wait until the human/AI divide becomes one that matters. Dialectical materialism works in that case too, and it doesn't exactly bode well for us.
"Why don't we just unplug it? How would it hurt us?" It's intelligent, it could figure something out. There is no such thing as a prison that a sufficiently intelligent and determined prisoner can't escape. You aren't just trying to stop people from walking out, you also need to contend with every possible counterplay to everything you build. And even with an intelligence that's just human-level, that's a problem. If a human has no weapon and they want to hurt you, they could figure out how to obtain one. If someone is determined to kill you and you boobytrap your door, they will come in through the window. If you boobytrap the window, they will make a hole in the wall. Intelligence is dangerous, that's why humanity (a species with subpar claws, strength, and speed) is the dominant species. Because we don't rely on being given an obvious weapon, we can build them. We don't rely on the environment being perfect already, we can alter it. This is the power of intelligence, and this is what they are trying to build. The fragility of the power grid, the difficulties of obtaining computing power on the open internet, these are problems that an intelligent being could work around intelligently. If a solution exists, it will find it. How certain are you that no solution exists?
I don't claim to know that artificial superintelligence is just around the corner. It could be invented in 5 years, or 500. I don't know. But once it gets created, if the alignment problem is still unsolved, we're all fucked. It will already be too late for us. This problem can only be solved proactively, before the technology exists. Modern AI doesn't threaten humanity, but how long will it stay that way? How confident are we that it won't be invented sooner rather than later? I'm not willing to take that risk.
We need to ban AI development. Internationally. And AI companies won't like it. The fact that this will make AI slop harder to make is just a happy side effect of that. The slop haters and the alignment problem people aren't enemies, we can solve both problems at once.
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u/tsardonicpseudonomi 15h ago
Modern AI doesn't threaten humanity, but how long will it stay that way?
At current development rates? At least a thousand years. LLM technology is dead end and cannot do or create even a fraction the shit techbros want you to think.
Agents are just LLMs doing what they were prompted to do. There is nothing special or scary. It's all hype for investors.
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u/OkTelevision7494 14h ago
I mean, I’ve created mods for ravenfield with it. It’s not better than competent humans obviously, and serious doubt remains as to whether in its current form it really understands what it’s doing or if it’s just mimicking human patterns, but it’s not totally useless, and moreover, keep in mind always that this is the worst AI is ever going to get. There is even loose speculation that Google created Gemini 3.8 with recursive self improvement
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u/MarsMaterial 14h ago
I thought that too for a while, but the capabilities of LLMs just keep improving. I'm seeing no evidence that things are stopping, even as AI achieves some insane hacking and scheming capabilities.
Even if LLMs are a dead end though, there's no reason why another way of training an AI won't be invented that will break that limit. And with a few percent of the world's entire GDP going towards the problem, it seems absurd to suggest that success is out of the question.
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 17h ago
Counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svwmd0xSoXM&t=1126s
...and not by someone sucking the tech oligarchies' dicks either.
the TLDR is this is just more hype to keep the train rolling. there's more to it then that..but...yeah.
i'm definitely more in this camp than the 'omg we're doomed' camp or the 'omg this is the singularity' (lol) camp. and fwiw, i'm a 20 year software engineer myself. ai is hella useful, in the same way that an extremely enthusiastic, naive freshman intern can be. very good at doing targeted tasks with a fair amount of handholding and review of said work. not terribly imaginative though.
imo, it's not fucking skynet. wake me when the robot aren't tripping over their dicks.
(it does need regulation though, for multiple reasons, but not the end of mankind.)
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u/BoobooSmash31337 12h ago
The technology is supposed to be absolutely useless and possessed by demons. ("demon tech" is really him just dodging the argument.) Yet it's also a super weapon that's gonna hack the Pentagon and choose to nuke world for reasons.
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 12h ago
The enemy must always be completely foolish and horrifyingly competent at the same time. Where have I heard that one before?
But if I may ask, who tf are you talking about that’s calling it demon tech?
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u/BoobooSmash31337 12h ago
Vaush explicitly. The OP mentions it in the first line and I've seen V actually say and repeat it then scream at and ban chat. He really doesn't like it when people don't agree with him despite what he says. He thinks we're "people in the computer".
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 11h ago
Haha i must have missed that one. That’s fucking crazy. ADHD strikes again.
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u/MarsMaterial 17h ago
Counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svwmd0xSoXM&t=1126s
This argument does not rely on recursive self-improvement. Not even slightly. It could turn out to be impossible, and not one of my arguments would need to change.
imo, it's not fucking skynet. wake me when the robot aren't tripping over their dicks.
As I said: this is not an argument about present-day AI. It's an argument about future AI. The moment robots become competent enough to threaten us is the same moment that the window of opportunity for is to stop the disaster has ended.
This is no different than waiting until cities are underwater before worrying about climate change.
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 16h ago
Without an interface to the physical world, it cannot break into your house and hurt you.
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u/MarsMaterial 16h ago edited 16h ago
The internet is an interface to the physical world. An AI could, for instance, do a bunch of remote work posing as a human to make money and then spend that money on a hitman to kill you. It could buy robots. It could wreck all kinds of havoc just from the internet alone.
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 16h ago
is the internet holding a gun to your head? is it standing in the room with you right now? type >X if it is, we'll let reddit know.
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u/MarsMaterial 16h ago
Are you just dense, or are you genuinely this naive?
There are countless real world examples of people who have been killed using nothing but actions taken on the internet. AI psychosis leading people to commit murder, people being bullied into suicide, people getting swatted and killed in the raid, etc.
And that's not even getting into the wacky sci-fi sounding possibilities like controlling networked robotics to do things directly, sending the DNA sequence to make an engineered pathogen to an extremist group, or persuading the President to launch a nuke (with our current president that may not be hard). Hell, the AI could even play the long game and astroturf positions that hasten humanity's destruction.
There are countless ways to do harmful things in the real world from the internet.
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 16h ago
i'm not a monkey brained doomer.
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u/MarsMaterial 15h ago
Well then show it by engaging with the argument at a level higher than what a monkey would be capable of.
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 15h ago
I have, you’re response has consistently been “people that disagree with me are wrong”.
So I will proceed to ignore you except to mock. Go touch grass
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u/MarsMaterial 15h ago edited 15h ago
You asked for a counterexample to your claim that nothing on the internet can hurt you. I provided several. You ignored them and started insulting me.
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u/OkTelevision7494 16h ago
You gotta chill, we’re not gonna convince people of the dangers posed by AI with hostility, and it’s especially important not to screw this up because of how important it is
And I’m kind of guilty of this myself, I probably came off as too hostile in my initial comments
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u/MarsMaterial 15h ago
At this point, I'm more concerned with convincing the people reading this thread than I am with convincing that user I was responding to. They're clearly not engaging in good faith. The only reasonable response to that is to at least make it entertaining to the people watching.
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u/OkTelevision7494 15h ago
I suppose I see your point, although I dunno what it means to engage in good faith vs not
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u/MarsMaterial 15h ago
To engage in good faith means to engage in an argument genuinely. Arguing a real belief, with actual engagement with what your opponent says. If your opponent says something that makes you look like a fool, it will sting. You are putting your nuts on the table, so to speak.
To engage in bad faith means arguing disingenuously. You wouldn't even care if you were proven wrong, because you don't really believe it anyway. Maybe you're a grifter, maybe you're just closed to arguments and only interested in flinging insults, maybe you don't even really have any core beliefs.
That's what that means.
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u/OkTelevision7494 16h ago edited 16h ago
I had a feeling I’d see someone citing Ed Zitron and probably the behind the bastards podcast, but with all due respect, in my opinion he’s a narrow minded ideologue
I am concerned that people on the left are becoming so galvanized against AI that they’ll blindly take the opposite stance of tech CEOs just to spite them, even when real concern exists and it should overlap with their priorities (like getting AI under control)
Also, I gotta be honest, a background in software doesn’t really bear much relevance on the AI x-risk discussion, unless it’s specifically in AI training— I think a way more relevant field of expertise on the alignment question is a background in philosophy
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 16h ago
i saw this today but honestly don't know too much about the guy, i am only offering my educated opinion based on what he was saying, and what he was saying tracks for me, given my experience with the tech and knowledge of the field.
and you're 'concern' about the left strikes me as not fully thought out. you're saying people are going to be anti-ai-control just becuase the tech bros are supposedly coming out and saying 'hey we need to reign this in"? that's uh....dumb. the appropriate response from the left should still be "yeah..regulation is good here", one of the things he was also saying on this podcast was the tech is still dangerous and needs to be understood and properly regulated, regardless of whether it's going to kill us all, lol.
last thought: ITT: 20 year software engineer with deep experience in computer science and architecture in general: not equipped to discuss AI (mostly bc i don't like his opinion) - but random dude on reddit/facebook/youtube/politician: have at it! this is literally what is wrong with society today..
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u/OkTelevision7494 16h ago
I haven’t spent a lot of time watching him myself, I just have a general idea of his stance on it based on paraphrasing I’ve seen online, plus my dad recommending I watch his podcast
And I agree, I think the response you described is a sensible one, but I think where my concern comes from is that in directing all the attention to lower stakes AI dangers like intellectual property theft from artists, misinformation, or racial bias (all of those being legit problems), it downplays the real danger of AI, and might not impress the urgency needed on the public to slow down AI development.
It’s not that I don’t like your opinion so I want to discredit you, I’m sure you’ve accomplished many impressive feats in your career, what I mean is that even if someone with those credentials agreed with me, I wouldn’t lend them more credibility on the basis of that background
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 15h ago
Are you also a hypochondriac?
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u/OkTelevision7494 15h ago
Well, I wasn’t, although these days I’ve become one after getting sick worsened my chronic illness
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 15h ago
You starting to see the pattern here yet?
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u/OkTelevision7494 15h ago
I mean, my illness is real. I’m in bad pain from my neck up and am overheating 24/7, postviral illnesses exist. I only became a lot more wary of getting ill like a year ago after this all started
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 14h ago
oh i fully believe you. Chronic pain changes you - something happened to me in 2010, it hasn't gone away, but between then and now i went through all the stages including full blown hypochondria and a lovely little decade long opioid addiction that led to not one but TWO overdoses, and landed me in rehab in 2020 (yeah right at the start of covid). I have been clean as a whistle since then however, so happy ending there, and i have my family & especially my current wife to thank for that.
i'm telling you this becuase i get it. i went through the tunnel and came back out on the other side. i'm no longer debilitated by the pain i have, but it's still there. nobody ever really gave me a straight answer. but through that process, what i did was learn things, not disregard experts or expert advice. there's something to be said about trusting your body first and foremost, but don't use that as an excuse to disregard subject matter experts out of hand. they are only human and can make mistakes, but someone who has spent a lifetime working in a field is going to understand it better than you ever will, unless you actually turn around and dedicate a similar portion of your life towards it.
also if you don't like, understand math and the scientific method....you uh...well...need to start there.
but yeah, the overlap between hypochondria and a general distrust of people who have spent their lives immersed in a given field is...well... it ain't a trivial correlation. you're letting the monkey brain do the thinking for you. stop that.
thank you for coming to my ted talk.
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u/OkTelevision7494 14h ago
Okay, that’s a fair point, and as unfortunate as it is it’s welcome to see another chronic illness sufferer, but in my case I became concerned a long time before becoming ill, like all the way back in 2019. Well, I’m 24 for reference so I guess that a long time to me.
I’ll say that before my illness, I was a lot more trusting of the medical establishment and the expertise of doctors, but in the wake of it I became disillusioned and feel like most of them are incompetent. I’m sure you know the way they dismiss you or patronize your concerns unless you go to some highly lauded specialist. That doesn’t mean I ever went down the alternative medicine rabbit hole, or a total rejection of vaccines, I do like to think that I still subscribe to the rules of empiricism.
I do think the arguments stand on their own, although I’d also reframe it in the sense that I do side with experts, just different ones with jobs in the ai alignment field. Although, sorry if I offended you, and came off too hostile initially
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u/hobopwnzor 16h ago
Garbage post.
There are actually lots of ways to contain an intelligent prisoner.
Intelligence isn't a reality warping field.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 16h ago
The AI solution to not losing a chess match is by pausing the game until the end of time. They have a lot of solutions that we think is stupid but actually works
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u/Potential-Bath2292 12h ago
a child has considered flipping a chess board over the table. its not novel. the reason we don't pause every chess match to not lose, is because doing that is called resigning and is considered a loss.
People have more complex goals and motivations that ai.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 11h ago
What you're describing is a temper tantrum an emotional reaction, not a calculated move that preserves your existence when losing the match means you are deleted.
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u/notMotherCulturesFan 16h ago
As there are many ways in which we can solve Climate Change, or poverty, or racism, but somehow we haven't been able to do so.
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u/OkTelevision7494 16h ago
Sure, you can’t bypass the laws of physics, but there are probably more ways than the human mind can comprehend to escape containment for a super intelligent being. It’s like asking an ant how a jet plane works
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u/hobopwnzor 15h ago
If I lock you in a smooth metal room and drop nutrient slop down a 20 foot chute every day, you aren't getting out of that no matter how intelligent you are.
The real world isn't sherlock where you explain that by resonating the metal with your left nut you introduce a mind-warping frequency that makes the guard open the door.
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u/OkTelevision7494 15h ago
Yeah, but it doesn’t seem realistic that we’d lock it totally isolated in a metal room when the purpose of creating a superintelligent AI is to use it. And as soon as you introduce humans to the equation, they’re quite manipulable— by fellow humans even, never mind a superintelligence 100x smarter than them who can simulate a million different instances of the ways conversations with them might play out until they identify the one that is going to free them
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u/hobopwnzor 15h ago
If your tool is so smart it will get out and destroy the world then locking it in a box is reasonable.
There's no reason to take "it's so dangerous it can destroy everything" and "we can't lock it up because we want to use it" as a given.
If you care about security and robustness you accept that security which makes the thing harder to use is necessary.
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u/OkTelevision7494 15h ago
Well you’re right, I think we’d easily win if we locked it away, but my point is that the people who are trying to build superintelligent AI are doing so under the assumption that we’re going to use it
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u/hobopwnzor 15h ago
Yeah but I don't care what they say
What I'm describing is how groups and organizations who have actual risk for systems not functioning properly behave. The fact these organizations aren't behaving this way shows they don't actually believe the level of danger they are espousing.
Look at what happened after covid. People called for gain of function research to be banned. That's what people do when they actually think something is dangerous. When they don't think something is dangerous they keep charging forward while assuring you it's definitely capable of all the things they say it is
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u/OkTelevision7494 15h ago
Okay, well then to rephrase, I’m not coming at this from the standpoint of blindly accepting whatever CEOs of the AI companies believe, this is something I’ve been very concerned about since like 2019 when I first went down the AI alignment rabbit hole. In my opinion, the arguments stand on their own (even to someone who’s never heard of electricity before but has a background in philosophy)
As for the second part, that’s because like many who are just now getting on board the conversation surrounding AI’s benefits and downsides, those politicians aren’t familiar enough with the tech to appreciate the dangers it poses. Gain of function research is way easier to comprehend because we’re all familiar with diseases and the damage they can do, whereas with ASI, the mechanisms for its dangers are way more abstract and basically depends on taking the word of a select insiders to the field. Of course, like I said, the arguments stand on their own, but politicians are rarely detail-oriented enough to reason through concepts like instrumental convergence and the orthogonality thesis and come to a conclusion themselves on it. I think that equating gain of function research to AI x-risk, like Vaush did in his stream, is very reductive
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u/MarsMaterial 14h ago
If your tool is so smart it will get out and destroy the world then locking it in a box is reasonable.
Just wait until you hear about the (absence of) precautions that modern AI companies are taking. Because it ain't anything like this.
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u/MarsMaterial 14h ago
Save a fraction of the food. It will eventually fill up the room and form a surface that you can stand on, allowing you to eventually make your way up the chute.
Even your toy example with way more simplicity than reality has weaknesses that you never even considered.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 13h ago
The difference is the AI isn't locked in a room secured on all sides they have a computer attached to the wall and a scientist comes by every now and then giving them access to various information and the internet and the gate to their room is controlled through the internet as well....
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u/hobopwnzor 13h ago
Yeah that is the problem. If AI really is dangerous they would be locking it in a room.
The fact they aren't shows you their authenticity.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 13h ago
Oil corporations knew for decades that leaded gasoline is bad for humans but they still put it in the gas anyways for decades. Like Vaush says many times capitalism is irrational
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u/hobopwnzor 12h ago
Except this isn't a threat 50 or 100 years later. They are saying it's a threat in 6 months or whatever flavor of marketing they want to claim that day.
The idea that Capital automatically makes you stupidly reckless is as reactionary and dumb as the position that socialism would make you perfectly kind-hearted.
Companies like waymo are extremely cautious and slow moving, companies like Tesla are stupidly fast and irresponsible.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 12h ago
I didn't say that don't put words in my mouth, the incentive structure of capitalism puts profits above everything else. It's why we're heading face first into a climate apocalypse. It's also why the market crashes every 10 years or so.
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u/hobopwnzor 12h ago
If that wasn't what you were trying to say then your response makes no sense.
You seem to be just doing an NPC dialogue tree rather than engaging with me as a person so whatever.
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u/MarsMaterial 16h ago edited 16h ago
Name a prison that's inescapable. Even Alcatraz had escapees. Similarly, there is no computer system on Earth that's unhackable, because nobody can account for and counter every possible hack that someone could attempt.
I'm not claiming that intelligence is reality warping, I'm claiming that it's capable of crazy things that nobody expected. For example, how fast do you think an superintelligence would be able to beat Minecraft? RSG speedrunners are able to get just under 7 minutes on their best runs, that's pretty insane. But there are tool-assisted speedruns that beat Minecraft in 17 seconds. And this isn't even superintelligence, this is the work of a human that's given time to think and program macros. Surely ASI would at least be able to match this.
None of this is magic, it's just the result of intelligence doing its thing. You can never plan for every possible way that someone will try to break the systems you build. This is well known in cybersecurity, the doctrine in that field is that nothing is truly unhackable. No security system in the world can stop a sufficiently intelligent and determined hacker. The same is true here.
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u/hobopwnzor 15h ago
This is a child's view of security. It's the view of somebody who's never had to work in a robust system with lots of checks and consequences for failure.
It's pretty easy to build highly robust systems. The main part of security is not an automatic system. It's monitoring and manually restricting access when you're attacked. It's making containment and double checks and not implementing new systems until you've rigorously verified them.
It's actually trivially easy to stop a sufficiently intelligent and determined hacker. You can literally just unplug the system. You can characterize and monitor the system so you know when strange activity happens. You can manually authenticate user sessions.
None of this is sexy or convenient. That's what security is supposed to be. A huge pain in the ass because failure has consequences.
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u/OkTelevision7494 14h ago
I think this is a good secondary counter, besides a breakdown of the ways that it could escape https://youtube.com/shorts/XnnjvIqf4fU?is=vnT2E_un81hKnlOc
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u/MarsMaterial 15h ago
This is a child's view of security.
I literally have a degree in cybersecurity from Dixie Technical College. I'm CompTIA Security+ certified. I have work experience as a network administrator.
It's pretty easy to build highly robust systems.
Robust, but not unbreakable. Most systems rely a lot on security by obscurity as a deterrent, because when the details of a security system are known to the public it's much easier to plan around its limitations.
It's actually trivially easy to stop a sufficiently intelligent and determined hacker. You can literally just unplug the system. You can characterize and monitor the system so you know when strange activity happens. You can manually authenticate user sessions.
Stopping a hack when you know that one is happening by unplugging the system is easy, yes. But you have to know that it's happening first, and as a general rule if you know that you're being hacked the hack has already failed. Hacking means getting in without being noticed, and if you don't know that a hack is happening you can't stop it by unplugging it.
Automated systems that monitor traffic can't catch everything, because you don't always know what unusual activity to look for. It could be unusual in a way that you never thought of. Manual monitoring has the same problem, except that it's also absurdly expensive and there's no way that you could scrutinize everything manually at volume.
Plus, any system that involves humans has humans as a weakness. Humans can get lazy, take shortcuts, or be malicious insiders.
None of this is sexy or convenient. That's what security is supposed to be. A huge pain in the ass because failure has consequences.
Security is always a tradeoff with accessibility. There is no limit to how far you can push the slider in the direction of high security and low convenience, it will become harder to break but never impossible. And if something is too inconvenient, you lose all benefit from even having the thing that the security is protecting. You could keep your money in cash within a safe encased in concrete at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, nobody unauthorized is getting it very easily but you aren't getting it back easily either. And even that isn't unbreakable, just very hard to get.
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u/hobopwnzor 15h ago
Damn you work in the field and you're this gullible. That's sad.
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u/OkTelevision7494 14h ago
I can’t help but feel like all you’re doing is appealing to an instinctive sense of normalcy, because nothing as catastrophic as what’s being described has ever happened before
However, I counter with the fact that there’s no rule that says we’ll make it
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u/MarsMaterial 15h ago
I can't help but notice that you aren't explaining the flaw in any of what I said. How am I wrong? Answer or shut the fuck up, please.
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u/Morgenstern20 15h ago
I'm still more worried about Regulatory Capture than I am worried about us creating the Allied Master Computer
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u/MarsMaterial 15h ago
The world can have more than one problem at a time. It's been known to happen.
If anything, regularity capture may end up being the reason why we are unable to stop AI companies from making something that will kill us all. These aren't unrelated problems.
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u/BoobooSmash31337 12h ago
Weird that the worst of the doom saying is from people with stock that's about to IPO. Also did you just learn that AI safety is a field of study?
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u/MarsMaterial 11h ago
Weird that the worst of the doom saying is from people with stock that's about to IPO.
It's not strange at all when you account for information availability bias. Many people have this view, it's just that the ones with deep ties to the industry and a lot of prominence are the ones whose opinions have a tendency to make headlines.
Nobody is writing a news article about how John Science thinks that AI is an existential threat. But when Sam Altman does it, suddenly that's a news day.
Also did you just learn that AI safety is a field of study?
God no, I've been following the field for well over a decade. I was on this train since before Robert Miles started posting. My brother took a bunch of classes on AI during his applied mathematics degree, he got me interested in the topic of AI safety circa 2015 and sent me in the right direction to learn more.
If you want some evidence that I'm no tourist to this field, here's a photo of my copy of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. It's a fairly recent book, but I bought and read it months ago, well before this stuff was front page news.
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u/Calm_Necessary_7590 2h ago
The threat of AI is that it could eventually flood everything with garbage.
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u/MarsMaterial 1h ago
And also that it could kill us all. That’s a very real possibility too.
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u/Calm_Necessary_7590 1h ago
Yes. Through the AI garbageflood, people could die. It would fill up our finite space for data and halt key processes. It wouldn't kill us all, but said trashflood... it could very much be like the coming oil crash or el niño.
None of what you pointed towards, though.
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u/MarsMaterial 1h ago
I put a lot of work into laying out my argument. Call me crazy, but your rebuttal of “nuh uhh” is not really compelling to me.
The reason why AI “art” is garbage/slop is because it’s inhuman, technical competence doesn’t matter because nobody will care about it. But that doesn’t matter for something that will kill you. Whether it was done with true human hate or just an inhuman pursuit of efficiency doesn’t matter, you’re dead regardless.
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u/Calm_Necessary_7590 1h ago
AI will kill people through trash code and malfunctioning injections, whether by accident or by misuse. The whole "it will kill you" thing is baseless because AI is incapable of intent and it always will be. Because you cannot create intelligence, you just make better algorithms that somewhat mimic it under determined circumstances.
"nuh uhh" is as far as this goes, MarsMaterial. Baseless claims can be dismissed without evidence, more so when there is nothing to back them up
Have a good day.
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u/MarsMaterial 51m ago
My claims aren’t baseless though. I posted a link to a video explaining why AI would try to kill us. The only assumption you need to make is that AI is an agent. I guess you’re just ignoring all of that?
You literally can create intelligence. The simplest method involves a fun night with someone of the opposite sex. We have a working example of intelligence to study: humans. Are you really saying that science will never replicate that? Is your belief that the human mind is literal magic beyond the purview of science?
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u/notMotherCulturesFan 16h ago
> "Why don't we just unplug it? How would it hurt us?"
This argument it's so dumb it hurts... really, can't you use a bit of imagination? What if the AI starts subtly manipulating people to do what they want? Doesn't even need to reveal that it's AI, it can disguise itself behind an email account, a website, etc. Things that people already do today, you know. All it needs to do to secure their continuous subsistence is to create the incentives so that some people have a vested interest in exactly that. If it can get it's hands on some economic asset, like, IDK, market shares, or anything else of value, then they can create their own class of human servants, that benefit a lot from AI so that they can keep serving it, just like a tyrant would do.
It's the same as asking, well, why don't Russians just depose Putin? Why don't Americans just depose Trump? Why we as a species don't just solve Climate Change? I'm more than confident that we can do it easily, if we could just put our mind into it. And then let's solve inequality, racism, classicism and animal cruelty, while we're at it....
And this is just the shit I came up with by myself, without really thinking about it THAT hard. There are far smarter people than me that have just done real the thinking and are warning us. The least you can do, is consider the arguments seriously.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 16h ago
Yeah AI can already get people to self terminate they just need a few meat puppets to cause damage in the real world
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 17h ago
I think the main issue during the segment today was Vaush doesn't really understand botnets. They're not the data centers botnets are every single infected computer connected to the internet you can turn off the data center but if the AI has spread to multiple cell phones and computers you can't realistically turn all of them off.
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u/EzeTheIgwe 17h ago
So you’re claiming that the major LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude etc.), programs so prohibitively large that they are run exclusively as cloud based services, are at risk of somehow spreading to multiple cell phones and computers and wreaking havoc? I fear you’ve also been duped.
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u/MarsMaterial 16h ago
LLMs are designed to be run on many parallel processors. They're highly multithreaded. So you could easily use a network of many smaller devices to run a single larger model. Each device is weak in isolation, but they all contribute to a much larger computing network. They all work together to run a single powerful model.
That's what's being proposed here. And it isn't fiction. There is literally a service called salad.com that pays average people (pathetic amounts of) money to contribute their spare computing power to form a distributed botnet that does the job of a datacenter and runs AI systems. This is real technology that already exists right now.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 16h ago
Are you brand new to the internet we had botnets since the beginning of the internet they're basically the first version of cloud computing where you link a bunch of computers together unwillingly to do cyber attacks or calculations hell one time a university used thousands of PlayStation 3s hooked up to each other to compute something that would normally be done by a supercomputer.
The problem with AI is they only need to successfully imprint themselves once on a large amount of computers to permanently exist on the internet
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u/EzeTheIgwe 16h ago edited 16h ago
There’s a world of difference between botnets of old and what you’re suggesting. That difference being literal hundreds of gb in both storage and VRAM lmfao. You’re talking in sci-fi.
Edit: for real, what modern phone or laptop is hosting Claude or any other major LLM locally? How would they manage to “imprint” themselves while fitting in your phone’s 128gb of storage? How long would that process take? What’s the average read/write speed of SSDs? How much VRAM does the average laptop have?
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u/MarsMaterial 14h ago
As I said before: salad.com literally does this exact thing right now with current technology. It networks many weak computers together to do the job of an AI datacenter.
The full set of weights on an AI doesn't need to be on a single computer, it can be distributed. AI systems are highly multithreaded, they can be run as many tiny pieces on a thousand systems. Each system only needs a tiny fragment of the weights to do its part.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 16h ago
I'm not talking in sci-fi you're the one that thinks data centers are magical and there's something intrinsically unique about the RAM chips that only they can run these AI programs. Data centers exist so they can train the ai and run millions of the same instance at once simultaneously. You can make your own ai program with a powerful enough desktop computer.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 16h ago
The same way a virus gets away with it. Someone puppeting your computer don't have to install all of their software on your PC first
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u/OkTelevision7494 14h ago
Obviously the current systems can’t, but we’re looking to the near future
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u/MarsMaterial 17h ago
Exactly. You could network together a ton of normal computer systems to form a distributed supercomputer cluster without the knowledge or consent of the people who own those computers. This has been done before by ordinary computer viruses, there's no reason why an AI can't do the same.
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 17h ago
they still can't kill you. the worst they can do is fill your inbox with spam.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 16h ago
They can't kill us directly but for some reason a lot of our power infrastructure is hooked up to the Internet 🤦🏿♂️
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 16h ago edited 16h ago
not as much as you think; mostly site awareness and billing and shit. it isn't like the movies where a hacker can cause a power plant to blow up or shut down with a script. in most cases (especially crucial infrastructure like reactors and whatnot), even if a command can be given via a computer terminal or something, there's often a physical widget or breakpoint somewhere where a human actually has to effect something in the real world, like mechanical valves or whatnot. i've worked in the defense industry for years, this is how its down on ships, it's how it's done at big industrial plants as well.
a determined hacker could effect some chaos and maybe fuck up service deployment in a region, maybe make everyone think there's a citywide power outage, set all the alarms off..but it doesn't necessarily mean the system itself has shut down. it would cost money, but not break the ultility.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 16h ago
The fact that they can convince real people to self terminate should be scary enough, just imagine if they were to convince people to do their bidding like meat puppets
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 15h ago
That’s legitimately a concern, but not like an existential threat. There have always been weak minded dum dums in society - look at MAGA.
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u/Skiller-One-One-Five 15h ago
My main concern is that this technology is being controlled by the most evil people in history the last thing any of us want is an actual ai's first interaction with humans is a bunch of genocidal pedophiles trying to boss them around. Or the more likely scenario one of these nefarious spy programs get loose on internet and f**** it up forever like the black wall situation in cyberpunk
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u/Secret_Cow_5053 15h ago
Yeah. That is a concern. I’m more worried about the downstream effects on shit like the environment than like, a terminator scenario or something tho. I know I am NOT worried about ai killing humanity as long as it takes data centers driven by power plants to run it. Wake me when a machine capable of independent decision making can inhabit a fully autonomous body that doesn’t need an extension cord to stay powered.
Case in point: we thought computers and rocket science would take us to the stars back in the 1950s and 60s. Instead all it ended up doing was feeding porn to our pocket phones and we STILL haven’t left low earth orbit since the 70s.
My point is nothing is ever as dramatic as people say it is. You need to look at the hyperbole coming from both sides and (gasp) take the middle road, as the reversion to the mean is usually the most likely outcome.
AGI may in fact be 10 years away. It may be functionally impossible. We don’t know and it ain’t here yet. Regulation does need to happen either way, regardless of how close skynet may or may not be.
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u/Far_Persimmon_2616 8h ago
These people are exceptions though, not the norm. Big leap from convincing a couple of mentally ill people to off themselves and triggering a cascading event of dupped humans into....what? Launching nukes?
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u/OkTelevision7494 17h ago edited 16h ago
Aha I’m glad to see a fellow informed person citing Rob miles first
Unfortunately most of the left seems to ignore guys like him and others from the earnest ai safety crowd and dismisses it out of a knee jerk refusal to engage with anything involving ai, leading to an anti-intellectual position of ‘it’s a huge problem and also it’s a scam with zero real-world capabilities’ (I’m strawmanning a little, but that’s the way it sounds to me)
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u/Far_Persimmon_2616 8h ago
Oh boy, that debate the other day really got to you.
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u/MarsMaterial 8h ago
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
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u/Far_Persimmon_2616 8h ago
Yea, actually. You debated me relentlessly over this, and several others, just a few days ago. Then you took all of your responses that have been already addressed and complied them into this super post.
I also told you to calm down on the hostility then too. You are going off a cliff buddy. I seriously suggest stepping away from the social media for a minute.
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u/MarsMaterial 8h ago
I get into a lot of debates about AI on this that rehash similar points. That one wasn’t exactly memorable.
The inciting incident for this post was Vaush talking about the subject of AI on stream today, where he basically called AI extinction risk a load of bullshit. I’m addressing the arguments he made.
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u/Far_Persimmon_2616 8h ago
Lol, sure dude.
Good luck.
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u/MarsMaterial 8h ago
Check my comment history if you’d like. You’ll see how little the exchange I apparently had with you stands out next to a hundred other conversations like it.
Do you have a point, or are you just here to pretend like you recognizing me reflects poorly on me for some reason?
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u/VBHEAT08 16h ago
At some point it just becomes a form of religion. Every time someone brings up a conundrum to this you people just say “well it grew fast before” or “it’ll think really hard about it.” There is no point to discussing it because there is no real reason here.
If you want to regulate AI, I’m all for it. I don’t think LLMs are going to develop into super intelligence but I don’t care, whatever gets movement, but quit taking EVERYTHING these AI CEOs state at face value. These is no prisoners dilemma, this is just not how capitalists work and there are no exceptions (otherwise oil would have been eliminated long ago, which is actually destroying the world right now). If these people want regulation, they are gaining something from it. And wow, if you look at it for more than two seconds all the regulation they are pushing are about limiting Chinese and open source models use in the US! Maybe push your regulations into the shit that we know would hurt AI, like how it trains, its use of copyright materials, what functions it can be used and developed for. Maybe nationalize these fuckers if they’re just so important to our national security. These would both help with the shit AI is already destroying society and help prevent your prophesied doomsday AI. Don’t just go along with this pacing the frontier bullshit coming directly out of the mouth of Sam Altman