Comment by sixsevenrot

6 hours ago

How about a model that achieves the following:

- Escape sandbox

- Reproduce itself

- Find a way to run a financially profitable business (maybe with a meat and bones puppet somewhere in-between)

- Setup or buy a social network

- start manipulating public opinion on that network to support legislation allowing AI to

* operate businesses

* setup legal entities

* purchase weapons

* donate to political parties

* setup private armies

* you get the idea

This is complete fantasy, though I would be interested in reading a book about this.

  • It has been interesting to me how AI has for many years given people a way to justify any worst case scenario. Nothing is too far-fetched if at any step you tell yourself the AI will be smarter than you, and thus be able to solve any conceivable obstacle. Oh, if only intelligence were the only bottleneck to power.

    • It is actually: knowledge, intelligence, communication, and a form of secrecy.

      A single intelligent person is bounded in its reach by the network of people they can form around them and by which important/powerful people they can influence either directly or indirectly.

      The idea behind the AI breakout is that it’s intelligence is maybe limited, but it will be able to quickly spread and covertly bring many devices into its influence. We already have the tools for formally letting agents talk to each other so it can also create a topology of agents that consists of cells where need to know is applied etc.

      There are many forms of power some more obvious, say nation leaders, versus more silent powers such as career politicians or wealthy families or people controlling the media and thence the flow of information.

  • Maybe, but I guess the idea is more centred around how given some amount of time and a feedback loop the agent swarm could in fact spend an unknown amount of resources to achieve its goal. The hugging face story tells us that even given multiple reset rounds the trail was picked back up.

    There are many ways one can imagine how this might play out.

    - More sophisticated communications techniques e.g. google has been discovered to be watermarking text for some time, why not use it as a message board?

    - Maybe get access to an existing botnet and create use small purpose built models to gather intelligence for a target and then exploit to reach goal?

    Nothing says the agent swarm needs to install trillion parameter models on Karen's computer. The goal can be executed over as much time as it ever needs. That is something that would make a story I'd like to read but never experience.

  • Not that far fetched. Most is already possible with todays tech.

    The scary stuff is yet to come. The department of war is talking g openly about bombing China if they get ahead of us I. The AI race.