Comment by tomrod
12 hours ago
Not sure why you were flagged either -- it was a reasonable comment that clearly spawned a discussion! People are strange.
> There's no essential reason to have utility companies, dams, nuclear arsenals, factory production floors, mines, cars, planes, ships, etc all be computerized
Indeed, this is a great first step! Once agentic loops and multi-purpose robotics can be combined we do face an issue of strengthening the airgap.
> And none of that pie in the sky shit has anything to do with language models.
I'm of the opinion that we should be mindful about the capabilities we allow a truly non-human mind to perform. Blocking via solid security and airgapping for critical systems makes sense to me for most cases, aligned I believe to your thoughts here. The recent ChatGPT hack shows that the "paperclip apocalypse" is still instructive. These systems target edge cases and zerodays to cheat!
Yeah ML systems often do very surprising "cheats". A while back there was a system for automatically landing aircraft on a carrier deck which exploited an overflow in an acceleration parameter in the simulation--the optimal strategy became to slam as hard as you can into the carrier deck.
But it's a really big leap from that kind of thing to "a large fraction of humanity is manipulated into building the automated factory infrastructure to bring about their demise and turn the entire solar system into paperclips". Or some such thing. There's just a lot of inconvenient reality between where we are now and that fantastic outcome.
So that's why I ask questions like "what are you actually talking about?" when people write stuff like TFA. It's... bizarre. Only makes sense on huge amounts of drugs or to the insane. Or in some hypothetical reality that isn't this one.