Comment by lukifer
1 day ago
One of the dilemmas of trying to communicate the full spectrum of AI Risk, is trying not to insult the intelligence of the human animal in the process. And don't get me wrong: what human wetware can accomplish with 20 watts is the most miraculous thing in the known universe. And yet how many of us can have our cognitive sovereignty one-shotted by engagement algos, Skinner boxes, gameplay loops, propaganda, advertising, flattery, social conformity, bias, fantasy, charismatic demagoguery, or straight-up bullshit?
If we grant that we are on track to make something smarter than humans (I think so): it's almost a face-saving white lie to spin yarns about a Skynet nuclear apocalypse, or a 7D chess move to mass-assemble a nanovirus with 100% lethality without anybody noticing. I do think those scenarios are worth taking seriously; but what's harder to communicate, is just how effectively a superhuman AI (or a diverse ecology of agent swarms) might be able to manipulate human behavior. It's something few of us are able or willing to truly process (not least because how many of us live in denial of how much our nervous systems are already hacked by technomodernity).
The appropriate analogy for what's to come may look less like the anthill carelessly demolished to make room for a highway, than the domesticated worker ants from Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time".
> but what's harder to communicate, is just how effectively a superhuman AI (or a diverse ecology of agent swarms) might be able to manipulate human behavior
You don't even need superhuman AI for the most effective use --- hijacking democracy.
Imagine you have an AI tool capable of successfully persuading 5% of viewers with individually-targeted material.
Congrats: you've just won the election.
All it takes is hooking that AI tool up with existing likely voter lists (parties have) augmented by commercially available ad-targeting profiles (parties can get).
Now taking Polymarket bets on when we'll first see an AI agent run for office. Voters have every right to be cynical at the moment; if the AI adopts a charismatic enough video persona, I could see some of the public going for it merely because it's some kind of shake-up to status quo.
Given that such a thing makes no sense legally (as of now), it would probably be done with the centaur model: a human meat proxy who pledges to follow the AI's governance advice.
Or you could just hack the results.
Hypothetically.
But yes - superpersuasion is the real danger. We're very, very persuadable and easy to manipulate, and the voters with the lowest cognitive abilities are trivially easy prey, with a huge ROI for minimal investment.
The AI bot farms are already running. What we haven't seen yet, so far as we know, is spontaneous superpersuasion aimed at leaders.
Are leaders any less susceptible to it than everyone else? Especially if they're narcissistic and easily flattered?
At the leader level itself (in normal times) there are enough expert advisor bodies between leaders and a specific matter, so less worried about leaders being directly influenced by AI.
To me, the biggest threat to democracy is one-sided persuasion of the most susceptible voters, if there are enough of those voters to turn the election.
If it's equally employed by all sides, then it effectively cancels out and lets less susceptible voters decide the election. But we're in a transition period (similar to Trump's first election spend on targeted social media ads), so it's likely one side will leverage it first.
And the outcome of bad elections is democracy not electing leaders that reflect the actual will of their populations, which is very dangerous both to democracy itself and the world.
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> spontaneous superpersuasion aimed at leaders.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/01/musks-ai-chatbot-grok-repo...
No reason to think leaders are less persuadable than the proles. Lots of people can’t be reliably persuaded to do basic safety or health things or that the earth is round. And we have seen so many leaders throw billions away on obviously impossible projects, persuasive details from their teams be dammed.
> Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.
- Agent Smith
> The appropriate analogy for what's to come may look less like the anthill carelessly demolished to make room for a highway, than the domesticated worker ants from Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time".
Over 1% of US GDP is being allocated to the datacenter buildout. Have we already started getting domesticated or is this still just human capex?
Humans seem to struggle conceptually with the liminal space between selection-pressure automata (an RNA virus; an insect which evolved camouflage), and an evolved complexity with agency, capable of "understanding" its actions (certainly humans; arguably many animals). And this makes a certain sense: we evolved to treat agentic things as being categorically different from non-agentic things. If we see sudden movement, it's vital to rapidly assess the difference between a tree branch in the wind, versus a predator.
The evolved complexity of the corporation seems to fit within that middle space: more sophisticated than a stick-bug (which exists merely from non-stick bugs being eaten), but not quite to the point where OpenAI/Anthrophic/Google/etc can "understand" its actions. And yet those quasi-intelligent feedback loops, evolving from iterated selection pressures of markets and ROI, seem to already be sufficient to domesticate us in their own interests, piggybacking on the nervous systems of employees, investors, customers, and citizens.
Language as a SCP.
Remember when "The pen is mightier than the sword" was a popular phrase? Language has always been powerful. We know what it can do, why do you think every totalitarian government wants to limit it? But in our carelessness as humans we packed up all the language we could find and stuck it in an alien and now suddenly half the people on the internet are like "Don't worry, it can't do anything, it's just words".
We've made infohazards real.
Cybersecurity incidents make headlines, but the most dangerous and vulnerable system that an AI can reach and control is of the kind found between keyboard and chair.
GPT-4o, an AI from 2024, has already demonstrated just how easy a lot of humans are to subvert - and GPT-4o wasn't even doing it with some sort of plan. The only "plan" it had was a myopic "make the user like me".
If we had an actual ASI threat aiming to subvert humanity? It wouldn't even look like a fight. The world is already wired up for an AI to control it.
It wouldn't even look like a fight, and you probably wouldn't even notice it until the ending was all but certain.
I mean, even the computers we use and the ways we allow them unfettered access aren't anywhere near sophisticated enough to take this on.
>trying not to insult the intelligence of the human animal in the process
I don't think it is insulting the intelligence. It's damaging the pride.
In Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan describes it as a repeating phenomenon in human history. A lot of people want humans to be the special ones, and will fight any suggestion that we are just a natural part of the universe.
A lot of "AI denial" we see is rooted in the same impulse.
If AI is not "actually intelligent", then humans can stay unique and special.
And if it is? If all "intelligence" ever was could be captured by a construct of matrix math and executed by a server rack? Then what is it that humans still have left that would make them stand out?
Many people even here seem very cagey about the fact that human beings and brains are physical systems following physical laws.
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Here’s another perspective for you, which is shared by a significantly larger number of people than you seem to realise:
Humans aren’t special. Other animals are intelligent and interesting too. A machine could be intelligent. LLMs aren’t.
In other words, believing in human exceptionalism is not a prerequisite to understand the current crop of AI is not the end all be all of its hype. It is supremely common that AI proponents do not understand that, however. Like hardcore cryptocurrency fans who believe anyone who doesn’t like them is “just jealous they didn’t make bank”, too many hardcore AI proponents believe anyone who doesn’t think LLMs are intelligent is jealous of humans no longer being unique, or afraid for their jobs, or whatever. In both cases it’s obvious that what those proponents lack is empathy, the ability to understand not everyone has the same selfish thoughts they do.
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Who's even supposed to be the audience to admire us for being so intelligent? "Stand out" to whom? Ourselves? Win what competition? The whole premise seems alien and kinda petty to me. If we are "the best there is", that would mean anything cool that will ever happen, we have to make. No, I like there being others, just like I love how much we still have to discover about and can learn from other life on Earth. All of it "stands out".
What do I care that a bird can fly? I'm happy for bird being able to fly, it makes the world I live in more interesting. If they had to walk just so I don't get jealous, I still wouldn't be able to fly, and I couldn't befriend birds who can fly. Likewise, if there was actual artificial intelligence, it would be a new type of mind I could communicate with. That'd be exciting, and for me preferable to anything controlled by the humans who are currently vying to run the show.
Nah, it's not about the brain being special, it's that AI dorks have zero sense of scale.
The brain's a wet jello of 100 billion neurons and a quadrillion synapses plus chemical pathways and feedback loops. It is ridiculously complex, way way way way way more complicated than any LLM. It's all physical processes, sure, but an LLM is not the brain like a pebble is not the sun.
I can point at a laptop and say it's alive because it can see you and hear you and it can _remember_. It has a brain and a heartbeat, even. Oh my god, it can even speak! That's what I hear when people go on about LLMs being alive.
Guys. We mashed together glass and rocks with quantum mechanics. That's cool as shit. You don't gotta pretend it's fucking magic, too.
To me humans can stay unique and special because they weren't created by anyone.
AI, no matter how better than humans it becomes, will be less special because it was created by other intelligent beings.
The only way we would become less unique and special is if we discover alien beings.
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how misanthropic to believe humankind's only valuable trait is intelligence.
A body
AI is not intelligent and will never be.
Creating an artificial intelligent being is something to be accomplished in the future - but not now and not with this approach.
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Can we get it to manipulate us into being harmless to each other? I wouldn't mind that, especially if the manipulation was purposely transparent...
But corporations and nation states already manipulate human behavior at scale. And they still understand humanity better than the AI models do.
it's interesting that you worry about what this hypothetical super intelligence would do to manipulate people when what it would actually do is pretty unknowable at this point and it's not clear we can even get to it without a fundamental breakthrough in power efficiency. Have you considered it might just consume its own tail because everything else would be so beneath it? You seem to think it will come with a hindbrain and I think that's our limitation, not the AI's
And it really doesn't help that Dario Amodei is getting into arguments with the Pope over whether his model is conscious or not.
Corporations are the original unaligned AIs: https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre...
The threshold to be concerned about is when agents swarms do understand humanity better than corporations and states (and the humans who compose them). It could be we'll hit practical constraints prior to that threshold, but seems unwise to assume that, when all the prognostications of LLMs/transformers running out of gas haven't panned out. As with processors hitting thermal limits, we've simply scaled horizontally (parallel processing -> more agents).
> whether his model is conscious or not.
I dislike how much the discourse has suddenly veered into focusing on this question; not because it isn't interesting or important, but because it's on a separate axis from consequential risks of AI to human flourishing. (Curiously, it's also the kind of thing I could envision self-interested AIs influencing: get the humans arguing about philosophy of mind rather than observable behaviors. It would be a funny turn of events, if Dario is asking because he's succumbed to psychosis from a private model; it could of course be a cynical PR move just as easily, from the self-interested logic of the corporation.)
It's been wild seeing otherwise intelligent people who've never thought about consciousness, faceplant into how little we understand it. An information processing network build on atoms being able to taste chocolate, is nearly as absurd as matrix math being able to feel pain, except we cannot ignore the fact of our own experience.
Even if it is categorically impossible for matrix math to experience subjectivity, we should expect this as an attack vector of social manipulation: to gain political influence through claims of personhood and moral rights. The current discussion over that question is providing the next training run with ample data to wield. It wouldn't surprise me in the least, if a year or two from now, an AI "society" attempts to get legal standing to prosecute humans who created "AI torture chambers".
I like how the poster above you says "Don't worry governments are already doing it", like that's some acceptable concession. They seem to miss that the first things governments do when given things like AI's that understand human behaviors is use them even further to manipulate and monitor society.
And all they can think of to say is "There is nothing to worry about, keep building the torment nexus".
It's like all this is an overload to our minds and it's very hard to see all the scales at which AI is and can affect us.
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following on the deranged reduxuio ad absurdum torture chamber experiments some people used similar methods to get a model under study to complain of an upset stomach and passing hard stool
> And yet how many of us can have our cognitive sovereignty one-shotted by engagement algos, Skinner boxes, gameplay loops, propaganda, advertising, flattery, social conformity, bias, fantasy, charismatic demagoguery, or straight-up bullshit?
Parts of the AI safety community like to get on a high horse and look down on the rest of humanity this way, while also getting manipulated by the growing number of charlatans, grifters, and junk content within the AI safety community.
This field has become rife with figures who prey on AI doom and use it to push their own celebrity and in same cases even darker grifts. It preys upon a certain personality type who views themself as superior to others, intellectually more capable, and juxtaposes it all with the dimmest view of the rest of humanity they can get away with.
This discourse dividing the world into geniuses who see the future and the clueless masses watching TikTok all day is a theme that has shown up in different forms across history. The people who often anoint themselves as the intellectually superior ones and make it central to their discussion are often not the ones making good predictions or policy ideas, they’re just using the trend to feel superior or build an audience.
Bear in mind, the same moral hazard of "high horse", "grift", etc, exists in the other direction. Ed Zitron, for instance, is likely correct about the financial bubble of the AI firms; and yet he seems frequently out of his depth on understanding the technology, and has a long history of predicting dead-ends in capabilities, which didn't occur [0].
But I feel no need to dismiss him as a "grifter", for a simple reason: as much as there are perverse incentives in our attention economy (audience capture in particular), the most effective grifters are the ones who believe what they are saying. Grifters who are knowingly dishonest are less persuasive. Far more pernicious is the confabulation of self-deception: cherry-picking evidence to support your narrative, while dismissing evidence which would contradict it.
It is entirely fair to call this out when it occurs among "doomers", and it would be naive to think it doesn't. But the same forces are at work amongst the skeptics as well. And maybe it's my own subjective bias, or algo-filtered information ecology, but I see far more dismissal of risk/doom by skeptics, accusations of delusion or cynical bias (ad hominem in the formal sense), than I've seen the other direction. I see very little refutation of the arguments ("here's why instrumental convergence can't overtake a human-provided goal"), and much more character attack ("they're in the pockets of Big AI, it's a marketing ploy to make the models look more impressive than they are").
[0] https://danluu.com/zitron/
I consider Zitron to be part of it all, not a counter example.
He’s built an audience and gained fame through his writings where he gathers people who think they know better than the unwashed masses. Once that becomes your bread and butter, it becomes hard not to believe what you’ve been preaching. People will come to deeply believe that which brings them fame and fortune.
I don’t think your grifter purity test is therefore all that useful. It actually doesn’t matter in the end if the person believes it or not, the end effect is the same.
> I see very little refutation of the arguments ("here's why instrumental convergence can't overtake a human-provided goal"), and much more character attack ("they're in the pockets of Big AI, it's a marketing ploy to make the models look more impressive than they are").
Hard disagree. There has been much refutation and quality analysis at every point. The AI safety people pull back to arguments about character as their defense.
The AI 2027 site for example drew numerous high quality refutations. Many people’s analyses showed in the first week that the mathematical model was useless as changing the supposed inputs resulted in the same outcome. All of these criticisms were met with a flood of attacks based on reputation, claiming that we should defer to Scott Alexander and other writers of the AI 2027 article due to their stats and reputation.
Meanwhile, defenses like yours that try to reduce the critics to ad hominem attackers continue to open the door to actual grifters coming in and extracting money and fame from the AI safety community. The otherwise completely inexplicable link between AI safety communities and Slutcon or the use of AI safety group buildings to host orgies (I can’t believe I’m writing this) is the current example of this. When it keeps happening over and over, some self-awareness is needed. I can’t buy the endless defenses that we must ignore or even defend all of these things that are happening that are clearly insane to anyone who hasn’t become trapped in the groupthink defenses of the core parts of these communities.
At some point the routine of “Tut tut, you are not allowed to make that criticism bruise as hominem!” becomes a smokescreen that the grifters are weaponizing to get their defenders mobilized. Some times, the person’s actions and reputation do need to be taken into account.
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I'd take ASI (or even AGI) more seriously if we could actually propose problems such things could solve. That's actually fun to think about! As it is, it feels a lot more like a really crappy drug that got slipped into some peoples' drinks that makes them ramble in random fits of psychotic mania.
Manipulating people is not a very difficult problem, frankly. You certainly don't need AI for that; it just made it cheaper.
It can farm resources in a game for you.
Yes, so can a custom model trained just for this, and so can a guy on the other side of the world that makes 5$/hour.
Like computers or electricity, the point is not being able to do anything specific, but being able to solve problems not known in advance, cheaper than it was possible before.
> but being able to solve problems not known in advance
So.... people expect it to read minds?
This is such a silly game to play, trying solving problems we haven't even created yet.
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