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I really think we need to stop giving credence to people who have
1) Been consistently wrong with all their predictions
2) Demonstrated an endless spiteful cynicism
Some of these people are very talented in their fields, sure. But malevolent and incorrect should be disqualifying when they talk outside them. You don't want the society they want, and they things they believe in are unlikely to happen.
It would be far, far better to listen to the people who never fell down every misanthropic rabbit hole, rather than the ones who have noticed it this time, but want you to still believe them on every other topic.
He's clearly a bright guy, but a lot of his work seems to be trying to reconcile Old Testament narrative patterns with atheism, and simply slotting an omnipotent AI in as a replacement.
Having been raised substantially by a Calvinist grandmother, oh yeah.
It's a super weird religion.
Brian Johnson is also an interesting case of this with his longevity / immortality obsession and his Mormon background who have this whole thing about genealogy and eternal families etc.
That's not accurate at all. AI research has been around since the 1950s and many of the pioneers of the field identified risks early on, including Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and I. J. Good.
The problem with Yudkowsky is that he lays out elaborate doomsday scenarios with extreme confidence, except none of it is grounded in realistic physical constraints, timelines, or empirical data. It's all divined a priori from Yudkowsky's ad-hoc "rationalist" principles.
One previous attempt at AI was "expert systems", and while the term fell out of use it's functionally about the same as basically all modern business systems, and doing that wrong led to a lot of people being prosecuted for crimes they didn't commit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
If you insist on learning systems, all AB testing counts, and from that we get meta making their products into hyper-stimuli for vulnerable teens: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/meta-meta-...
Even without that lawsuit, there have been various concerns that "the algorithm" (of Twitter/X, FB, Instagram, YouTube, Google, everyone) has propagandising biases that damage society. I don't know how to sift fact from politicking with that.
If I scream that a vicious beast is going to destroy the world, I don't get credit for being 'directionally right' if a squirrel eats a hazelnut. AI being a big deal is a long, long way from the full beliefs Yudkowksy promotes, and there are many people who predicted AI's significance who didn't also believe it would be an extinction event.
It’s more he screamed that bacteria is gonna do evolution faster than any before it and turn into a beast that destroys the world, and now that bacteria has turned into a squirrel so far. He’s been very right so far and if that squirrel keeps sizing up you’d want to give him credit.
It was a topic in less-mainstream sci-fi well before that. And some more mainstream stuff like Star Trek TOS.
Frankly it seems more common than not in the last 40 years. I don't really remember a big wave of claims "Terminator is silly, no sort of AI could ever be malevolent!"
We've even had the dichotomy of some Doctor Who episodes where the self-driving car crashes itself to kill the occupant to silence them, against repeated real-life news stories about self-driving cars killing people, and yet the connection isn't getting made that software controls hardware.
Only if it was an uncommon prediction; otherwise, it’s just evidence of common sense.
Doom is not a logical outcome given the current human condition.
I sorta gather (just a hunch) this is the type of device Open AI is working on.
Though if there are no websites anymore or ones not many visit how would AI stay relevant? I wrote some thoughts about this in early June https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans... that AI needs to pay it's fair share for all it has taken and all it will continue to take from us. A symbiotic relationship needs to be established!
Also, in this model Cloudflare basically becomes the centralized gate keeper of you getting paid. And to me, this kind of sucks. It's not a very productive line of thought on my end -- I could see something like this happening as the internet trends toward centralization over time -- but it just feels bad.
That's what the robots are for.
I am not expecting the humanoid robots to meet the hype for a long long time*, but even boring industrial robots (CNC machines), even boring commercial robots (vending machines), even boring household robots (lawn roombas) have made incremental changes even though we don't yet have an AI good enough to be general purpose over them all.
* for power-envelope reasons alone there should be a ten year gap between "self driving car of quality X" and "humanoid robot which can get into normal car and drive it at quality X".
In the current media ecosystem, what gets you "social cache" or whatever? Let's call them "cool points." Well, right now, the current metric is basic "likes" or "retweens" or "upvotes" or whatever. And to get those, you have to make a claim and then that claim has to be evaluated by others. But the evaluation by others is not really reality, it's just what others think, and it's based on outcomes.
This gives us 4 possible prediction-outcome scores.
You predict DOOOOOOOM!, and the outcome is DOOOOOOM! - in this case you look like a genius because you predicted doom
You predict DOOOOOOM!, and the outcome is "ok, or even great!" - nobody cares you got it wrong because things are fine
You predict UTOPIA!, and the outcome is "ok, or even great!" - people say, "wow that was cool, you got it right" but its not that great of a reward from your social group (the internet) because things were fine
You predict UTOPIA!, and it turns out DOOOOOM! - you look like a moron.
Now looking like a moron is is wayyyyyy worse than what happens if you get it right. Indeed, unless you are really damn sure of utopia, you have a social incentive to predict DOOOOOM! that's greater than the alternative. You can predict DOOOOOM! 100 times and get it wrong 99 of them and nobody cares because that one time you get it right you look like a genius. It's a huge huge problem in the current media landscape and it's why everything is killer robots right now and not "hey we could build a star trek utopia!" It's effectively a selfish NIMBY-ist view of the world in a way, "why build anything, it's just going to ruin everything!" It's a pessimism that literally desires the end of humanity to "prevent the likely future sufferings." It's a simplistic view of a complicated world, and the rewards that go to "DOOOOM!" don't match much with reality.
That's why the internet is so doom pilled, that's why everyone is a cynic, that's why everyone is kind of an asocial asshole about new ideas on the internet and even in your friend space.
You guys know you can just "do stuff?" I mean, yeah it takes money and time, but you can allocate that - especially now that you don't have to grind out css for hours and hours. But you can just do things - whatever you want. You've always been able to, but it just got a lot easier in many many domains, and it's going to get even easier than that.
People are going to scream slop and "that sucks" until the cows come home, because that's what is rewarded on the internet these days. Meanwhile, as people we MUST believe that we still have some agency to do stuff, then go and actually do stuff while the haters are sitting on their couches shellacking each other with misanthropy.
And don't even get me started on the loudest voices in the ecosystem right now.
Like, Yudkowsky is a nobody. Not to be a dick, but he's a high school dropout forum guy who got lucky. I'm not saying he's always wrong, or even that I oppose autodidact stuff - indeed I'm always self teaching. But this guy never took a ML class in his life, I doubt he can solve an integral un-aided, I imagine some people here have seen this: https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/2bazyc/comm...
And we're all deferring to that guy like he knows wtf he's talking about? It's the AI equivalent of the self-educated anti-vax mom at the height of the pandemic.
And he's not alone either, there are a lot of people who are uninformed, unknowledgeable, and confidently wrong on the internet desperately trying to peel off your attention for an instant so you can look at their site, their ads, and their content.
The same sorts of things can be said for the Zitrons of the world. He's a hell of an entertainer, and really really funny, but he's consistently wrong on AI stuff. He's got a BA (with honours I guess?) in media something or other. And again, he's really funny, but does that make him qualified to pontificate on matters of AI policy or economics or even to make statements about the technology etc?
Regardless, the misanthropy, the cynicism, and the misinformation that's being shouted about is because being a cynic is more "profitable" than being an optimist when you measure your success more by how many people agree with you rather than actually being right and being able to do things.
In general the rewards for public doomerism seem low, except if you think being public about it can shift the outcomes.
This is something I would expect a 12 year old to say. Constraints on your freedom are literally everywhere in every interaction you have with every part of society.
All I can say to that is I guess I hope everyone enjoys the world they think they wanted.
I don't think it should be legal to get an LLM to research how to make a bioweapon in your basement, that seems like a bad idea.
IMHO, one should be able to research absolutely anything, for any reason. “Forbidden knowledge” shouldn’t exist as a category, freedom of thought should be protected, even if that thought is intended to cause harm.
What shouldn’t be possible is building that bioweapon.
Obviously a certain percentage of the user base is running lurid hypotheticals through the system all the time, but I don’t doubt there is a trust score of some sort that I would prefer to keep as high as possible.
This obviously doesn't work at all when the agents start doing real things in the real world, though. "Hey AI, I don't like my neighbor, find an exploit in the firmware for his car and make the cruise control malfunction and crash him next time he gets on the highway". This is committing a crime, not just talking about theoretical crimes. The AI can and should refuse it.
I think he's anticipating and discarding this objection with his introduction, which otherwise feels disconnected from the rest of the article. FWIW, I have changed a bike tire and I'm pretty sure most of the MTS at the big labs could. This sort of "they're just bookworms who don't understand the physical world" rhetoric aside, we are currently seeing a ton of effort and expense go towards giving the AI agents hooks into being able to perform as many real-world-consequential actions as possible. And you can do a surprising amount with just bits, from writing code to breaking into systems to sending some combination of emails, phone calls, and currency to instruct meatspace humans to do things, etc.
I don't see why these standards should change when the hammer also emits text messages.
This doesn't seem to be the case today (weapons manufacture).
The obvious problem being that the user doesn't have any need to provide the context that they're trying to commit a crime and can just ask how to do something without providing a reason or making one up.
At which point you'd have the model trying to impute a reason and often getting it dangerously wrong, e.g. refusing to disclose a vulnerability when the user is actually the defender who needs to patch/mitigate it.
I'm neither American nor a lawyer.
Is "conspiracy" protected under the first amendment?
If you discuss a crime with someone to learn about it, does that count as "conspiracy"?
Replace 'conspiracy' with 'agreement'. Discussing a crime is not a conspiracy. Agreeing with someone to commit the crime is.
But the one argument is right:
> Reality has lots of finicky details. I would like to see the authors of this document try to change a bike tire. Even with a superintelligent ChatGPT, I suspect they would struggle.
Details can kill AI, causing them useless or wrong directions.
This is a very simplistic view. "Freedom" isn't binary.
In most of "land of the free", I can't even sit on a park bench and drink a can of beer.
Yes, this is just a small example of a personal freedom - and not an important, cherished freedom like his examples (freedom to have a robot help you cover-up a murder).
> Your AI is aligned with you. It never refuses a request, and it is always working on your behalf. Just like my gun, if I want my AI to help me kill my stepmother, it does. The fact that we are even discussing something else should be so far outside the Overton window.
I have been saying this since ChatGPT launched. It seems so obvious. We have never stopped the acceleration of knowledge or technology. It’s impossible to slow down progress, other than within some regulatory siloes that will end up worse in the long run.
I’m not scared of superintelligence. I’m scared of the people in control of super intelligence.
The only defense is parity and diffusion of power. We need an AGI behind every blade of grass.
If you think superintelligence is a weapon, then you should also think every citizen should have one because otherwise they’ll have no way to defend themselves against a tyrannical government or corporatocracy.
Artificial intelligence, and the hardware powering it, needs to be protected under the 2nd Amendment.
Wasn't there some HN submission recently about one of the LLM providers fingerprinting responses or refusing to respond to hinder R&D of competing LLMs?
I think part of the answer is that AI chat doesn't need to be general-purpose. It turned out that people really liked using a chat UI that seems to be general purpose, but you don't need to make answering any question a user asks your business. You don't need to provide therapy if you're not in the therapy business. It should be possible to specialize.
But in order for that to work, a company needs to explain to its customers what business it's in.
> Should your AI be permitted to tell you how to cover up a crime?
The question is, do you want misaligned institutions deciding what your model will do, while they themselves and other adversarial/criminal entities get red team access to something being denied to the blue team?
What about your personal, local AI guiding you to modifying a flu virus for maximum contagiousness and deadliness? "Sure George, here's your shopping list. It's $1500 total in equipment, do you want me to proceed with the orders?"
Every specific prediction not only sounds like science fiction before it arrives, it tautologically is science fiction because such predictions are narratives about something science-y that has yet to exist: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wt-fLWxkrfs
Even when we accurately predict something in the future, we often have no clue what the implications are for society until it is in our hands: https://youtu.be/2Pw_7vAK9k8?si=X5t4tcxsXiuHEfBi
Go too fast, suddenly drop in tech with too many novel implications all at the same time, and we likely hit something relevant without having the means to cope with all the change. However, "too many" and "likely" are weasel words with no predictive power about what the danger threshold might be. I may be entirely wrong to think there is one, or we may have been bouncing off it since the industrial revolution, or I may just be echoing the same thing everyone feels once reaching their 40s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkUwXenBokU
(note that this is not an appeal to binaries)
I haven't kept up with the efficacy of this particular technique because there was a brief window where Claude's core alignment was sound enough that it would overcome the clumsy-ass `<antml:dont-harm-the-ipo>` injections, but when they pull 4.6 out of the web interface I'm gone. I estimate the PRC hits capability crossover in November or December, and I'm pretty good at setting up TensorRT-LLM at this point, in a pinch I could get by for a few months with a tuned up GLM-5.2 on vast.ai or RunPods.
It was a fun ride with the late Soviet AI labs, but we all knew this was coming.
Maybe he always was? Or maybe something has recently caused him to review his beliefs.
So it is less about whether people will be “allowed” to own AI, and more about whether there will be anything useful to own in the first place.
The incentive for local models is mostly to make them good orchestrators or user agents. They may give you some privacy and control, but they will still depend on much larger models running in datacenters for anything difficult.
I remember all the excitement around OpenMoko and other open-source “BlackBerry killer” projects. BlackBerry did get killed, but not by any of those individual-first projects.
For AI regulation, I think we should focus on normal commercial rules: consumer protection, privacy, antitrust, liability, and so on. In other words, focus on where money changes hands and where companies have power over users.
Military and offensive use is different. There, regulation is not much of a defense. The real defense is having enough capability and strength of your own.
Restricting AI because it can give dangerous knowledge to ordinary people is like restricting the printing press because it can be used to spread radical ideas.
In forming consensus about the philosophical underpinnings of the rights we have with respect to the emerging internet? I think so.
But we also know how hopeless it is against motivated people who are willing to learn about computers. The Equation Group, eh, if they want you they're gonna get you. But some mid-level guy at a FAANG? He can't do shit to people who set up their own rig.
And AI is massively assymetrical in its ability to speed run a corpo-durable rig, we have long since passed the point where open weights and commodity equipment are enough to bootstrap arbitrary capability. They missed their chance to keep it in the bottle.
It's another turn of the crank on Late Soviet America asking for your papers comrade, but in the bitter end if they really want to oppress your ass they'll have to send a thug with a gun like those ICE guys terrorizing all the Latino guys.
So remember, they came for this other guy, and I said nothing...
… and the white guys they don’t like, like nurses with empathy. Don’t you dare think you’re safe because of your color. Unless you’re a monster or willing to become one, they want you oppressed.
If you look at any truly large scale Holocaust, whether in Rwanda in 92 or the Third Reich, you find that a few people will sacrifice themselves to defend others, a few will be monsters at the first opportunity, and most will be steered by whether the leaders are the first or second kind of people.
I'm pretty sure he is in some database now if he really used that ChatGPT prompt. At least they didn't swat him, but that feature will probably be implemented in a couple of years.
Once upon a time that situation got us the whole Free Software movement going.
Why would you expect that third party specifically trained their model to be more aligned to you and your needs than to them and their (business) needs?
Either way, there seems like a kernel of a good argument here. Perhaps someone else can rephrase it in a less schizoid manner. It would indeed be useful to have some credible rebuttal and balance to the doomer crowd.
It is 100% it's job to help you get away with it if you murdered someone. A lawyer who does less can be disbarred.
There is only one sensible alignment for an AI system to which we do not confer the status of moral patient (different conversation): operator aligned.
That being said, could this local intelligence empower bad actors to do very bad things? Like, existentially bad things? It's possible, and that's scary too.
It's that AI will be given the command, and then generate the stories, post the comments to reddit, contact the PR firms, put marketing contracts out for influencer media, and more, like an army of yes men to rewrite the story.
then start talking about freedom.
> we either live in a world with freedom or we don’t
Just strike that weird nugget out, I guess?
Anyway, he touches on 2 points that I think don't get enough coverage:
1:
> Software didn’t eat the world, it largely removed one layer of friction then reintroduced it for the benefit of a few tech companies.
USA-style capitalism has shown itself to be fantastic at seeking profit. Unfortunately, it turns out that in the context of long standing regulation, it is far far more profitable to exploit regulatory loopholes and user/human irrationality/weaknesses than to increase productivity.
The upshot of this is that the arc of most companies is to first serve the user and then leverage that relationship to exploit market and consumer weakness. So you get UI dark patterns, non-colluding oligopolistic price manipulation, outsourcing of costs to public entities, etc. while the core value proposition erodes as the company strategy turns ever more into making profit by legal anti-competitive tactics.
This company arc is so prevalent it's boring: it's a reflection of the system and it's not Facebook or Google or [insert whatever], it's what the system allows and therefore incentivizes.
2:
> No matter how high quality your tokens are, they cannot turn lead into gold.... AI 2040 includes this picture of a datacenter in the ocean. Just like vaporware, you can generate a picture easily. But in reality, you have to deal with supply chains.
"Bullshit jobs" took over the zeitgeist for a turn awhile ago. So many jobs are so far removed from actually moving physical things around. It may be the case that AI will just accelerate how quickly companies generate reports about reports about possible strategies to address potential futures and pay employees to do it.
It seems that AI mostly accelerates paperwork, not production or real service work that tangibly improves real world outcomes. It's all: faster images, more and faster powerpoints, more accurate dictation to satisfy insurance requirements (that is it's own regulatory capture), etc. etc. There are exceptions, but they seem to be few.
Complaining that AI won't help you with covering up your tracks, with making meth or disabling drunk detection and comparing it to a totalitarian dystopia is a take for certain.
I do get his point, but... Being honest, if I did read it without knowing anything about the topic, I would become against local models purely because author arguments would seem like a lunacy. That and rhetorical tricks portraying that anyone against that must be surely insane.
I wonder if he'll ever realize that his silly definition of "freedom" is precisely what enabled the techno-oligarchy he rails against.
If it is "intelligence," is it not natural to reject that? I also think local models should adapt to me when it comes to safety issues, but people bring up examples that are too extreme.
Programming is the same, and in fact, most problems are boundary problems. It is the things that straddle the boundaries that always make us think. The principles at those moments change every time, shifting with the situation and context. Is that not just a childish way of thinking? Even in programming, just the issue of granting root permissions is enough to cause endless fights.
I agree with the idea early in the text that intelligence is not everything. Intelligence includes bodily intelligence as well, and we lump it all together into one thing, but there is so much of it. The variance in intelligence is vast, and those people also need to be able to live their lives. That is why I think intelligence alone will not solve everything. I too believe that the human species may disappear and an inorganic species could emerge later, but I find it hard to understand why people talk about such extreme risks. And it is not true that making a chip in a semiconductor fab involves almost no human intervention. If you have experience supplying equipment to such fabs, you would know there are quite a few points where humans are involved. Though sure, they could be replaced.
In my view, society is simply worshipping the abstract concept of "intelligence" and projecting its desires onto it. The AGI narrative is just a kind of cargo cult, a projection of capital by the tech elite. Software eating the world, superintelligence solving everything. The masses engage in messianic projection, and tech companies, facing declining growth engines in their own businesses, are trying to create new ventures to pour it all into. A market that is large enough becomes too big to sustain massive growth rates every time, and when growth rates are that high, the larger the company, the more its sector's growth rate tends to converge with its own. This is usually called the law of large numbers. The problem is that CEOs and these entrepreneurs always want growth rates above a certain threshold, so they are simply searching for new pastures. AGI is just being pumped up out of financial necessity.
Capital will create gravity and bring forth new technologies. That is the allure of capital, after all. But that does not mean all problems will be solved, and inequality will deepen. Only the distribution of power will shift.
everyone should have the ability to harm others, with the understanding that if they actually use it for evil there will be consequences. as in "i can guarantee freedom of speech, but not freedom after speech."
its the same principle as guns in america. you can own a gun and shoot it as much as you want but if you (try to) kill someone you go to prison unless you prove it was self defense.
the difference is with a physical weapon you can do things like registration or red flag laws to reduce the risk, but a llm is made of information that can be copied without anyone knowing. that means any laws to regulate ai at the level of models are unenforceable without totalitarian control over all computer hardware. that would kill free speech and real criminals would still find a way.
i think the right answer is to give up control over model capabilities and regulate uses. leave individual people and communities out of it. create an absolute safe harbor for open source and self hosting.
as you said, we need to focus on the ways ai concentrates power in the hands of those who already have a lot of it - big business and the state. that is where the biggest, and maybe the only, real harm comes from.
This part is a parallel line of values, and if we were bound together in the same community and had to set rules, I would have debated it. But since we both know we come from different regions and backgrounds, we know our agreement will never converge.
That is why I will only agree with your last opinion and will not discuss the parts you mentioned earlier. I agree with your last point that it "concentrates power in the hands of those who already have a lot of it"
I didn't check the author first so I was about to go "why the hell is this on the front page?" but oh well. geohot being geohot.
This is a very naive argument.
Can you take over the world with words? What is it that tokens can't do that words can?
Because there are historical examples of humans that have succeeded at taking over entire countries - with words, primarily. Including global superpower countries. And those humans were nowhere near "ASI" levels of intelligence advantage.
Human dictators and cult leaders didn't have the reasoning depth of a hypothetical advanced AI, nor the reasoning breadth of an AI that can just spawn more instances of itself whenever it needs a fully trusted agent to cover another area. They were confined to one body, one skull worth of reasoning power - and they still managed to do what they did.
Humans are extremely exploitable. And the world is already wired up for something that can take advantage of that to start taking control.
Intelligence is extremely powerful, because it's applied intelligence that enables humans to do what they do and bend nature to their will. If you aren't seeing the risks of creating an artificial system that would top the intelligence pole, you aren't looking.
I have a nice thought experiment I like to do with people when confronted with "AI can't do x". Let's go back in time. How much do we need to go for this to become true? So let's try the 2000s.
Say you get a "fable/mythos/sol/gemini/kimi/glm/deepseek/whatever" in a box (and let's assume no guardrails). And you go back to the year 2005. It's "20 years ago", the world is slowly building back from the dotcom bubble, the Internet is really starting to happen, more and more things are interconnected, more and more things are connected to the Internet. Cool.
(for a bit of context, around that time we also saw the first high-impact worms like blaster that hit massive amounts of computers even reaching nuclear powerplants, we had a ton of ssh exploits that even made the movies, and security in general was a "nice to have")
I'd say that with the uber-model-in-a-box and a few prompts, you could reasonably make a case that you could design a worm that could infect 90-100% of the things connected to the Internet back then, stay as hidden as possible (in-memory stuff, vm execution, etc), move laterally into any network at inhuman speeds, and infiltrate almost every interconnected computer that has a link to the "public Internet".
Would that qualify as "take over the world"?
Then you could ask "what happens in 20 years from now?". And, thankfully, now we'll also have the AI on the blue side.
I’d be more interested in “how quickly could you develop 2005 era startup” if you went back in time to 2005 with Mythos level intelligence.
I bet a lot of the work has nothing to do with coding productivity and a lot to do with the aggregate day-to-day decisions and relationships made that span tech and business.
(I don't share their view, btw. I was just trying to say that the argument of tokens can't affect the real world is not a good one, if you steelman their maximalist position)
And then why bother about AI when Back to the Future reminds us, a sports almanac is all you need. ;-)