Comment by godwinson__4-8
3 days ago
Yet everyone laughed at the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient and it was being tortured...
People just pick and choose what they want to hear when it suits them. The fact is most people thought AI was a joke. Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
It's their right to pursue their electoral and economic self-interest but it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
This fed was voted in by this public. Maybe stop lionizing what other people think and think for yourself.
Do you think we risk extinction now more than ever because of AI? A simple refrain from slippery slope will show most AI doomerism is bordering on psychosis.
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
AI doesn't need to be sentient to be dangerous. Obeying and doing what someone tells to do is more than enough. What do you think they will tell it to do, and do you think it will align with your interests or the interests of someone else? Somehow I don't think it will be used to give everyone free ice cream.
>it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.
For the record I 95% agree with you, but I'd like to try an answer at:
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
We seem to be heading down this uncomfortable trend of many people using LLM models and anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
So in my opinion the most likely risk here is some underpaid military man that doesn't care about the quality of their work abuses AI for it and that AI hallucinates that nukes are incoming and world war III starts. To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
> some underpaid military man [...] abuses AI [...] hallucinates that nukes are incoming
here it is: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/report-us-almost-boarded-...
> To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
it's much higher than you think, at least during Trump admin. have you seen how LLM agents are being shoved down our throats at tech companies? the government is no better in that regard, there are all incentives to skip output verification
> anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
Wdym? GPT-6-Astra is AGI - Jensen even said so!
a year or two ago, I'd enjoy this comment as some usual HN satire. nowadays, especially here, I do see a lot of people that actually believe this, enough to make me think whether to laugh
> Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
You think people oppose data centers in their towns to protect their React jobs?
Typical programmer thinks everyone is a programmer.
NIMBYism is nothing new and is clearly not what I am talking about.
Try to keep up.
I'm talking about the widening backlash of which knowledge workers are an increasing part. Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
You know, here's what i don't understand...
Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?
You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.
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> Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?
The strike on the girl's school in Iran is an early example. That one happened when the AI didn't even have direct control of the weapons. All it took was people starting to offload their thinking to AI which we've seen is becoming increasingly prevalent.
With fully autonomous weapons being under development, the scenario becomes even bleaker.
It's long, but I recommend watching this video[0]. I believe the person being interviewed has one of the most lucid understanding of the potential futures regarding if AI is allowed to continue or not.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g4l7YkDQwA
This show is trash are you going to recommend I get medical advice from Joe Rogan next?
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable alleged domain expert rambles on and on for hours is such a low form of information.
Like please stop watching this. It's the same trash format the guy just talks in a soft English accent so his mediocrity is less obvious. You can do better.
What happened to debates? What's up with soft ball interviews and people going on and on for hours unchallenged? What's the point of listening to someone not willing to subject themselves to cross examination?
You said:
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
I apologize for answering. This is the only episode of this podcast I have ever watched, and I have watched it four times now. The person being interviewed knows what they're talking about. You would learn from them.
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The thing is it doesn't matter if AI is going to kill us all. The industry says it might kill us all, and the industry is valued ridiculously high based on the idea it'll take all our jobs. Why would anybody support that? I mean, unless you're heavily financially invested in it.
Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those qualify as ai doomerism.
I'm just spit balling but:
1. We've seen AI being crafty and cheating
2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI
3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have
4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"
Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it
5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other
6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?
7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts
Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents
8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return
Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress
One real existential risk of AI is when psychopaths use it as a cover for their agendas and actions, and move the Overton window where there's nobody to be held liable for anything since the AI ostensibly did it.
Another twist is getting rid of any remaining truth in the already post-truth world.
For example, the head of the totally corrupt Centerizberkom in Russia, the organization behind all those rigged "elections" of the past 20 years, showed an AI video depicting a casually looking man mass-dropping ballot papers into a box, followed by several outright fantasy AI characters doing the same.
Can you guess what the bottom line of that demonstration was?
Exactly - no video is a proof of anything anymore, and if some vigilant citizens try to film egregious violations of the "democratic elections" and share that, then it must be fake, because it's trivial to create any video these days with AI.