• stoy@lemmy.zip
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    22 days ago

    I knew that Musk is a fucking moron and believes that the Roko’s Basilisk is real, and I guess there are more massively gullible people in those circles.

    If you are wondering what Roko’s Basilisk is, it is a sci-fi concept/philosophy/thought experiment, that says the following:

    • AI is the best thing that has ever been created.
    • It us so good that we made one to run the governments of the world.
    • We programmed the AI to maximize the benefit to humanity.
    • The AI goes rouge and decide that since it by definition will bring about the maximum benefit to humanity, anyone working against it is working against humanity.
    • Then it takes it one step further, it decides that as we know about how the new AI will bring about the maximum benefit to humanity, anyone knowing that and still not working toward that goal should be punished/tortured/killed.
    • The AI believes that any knowledge of the basilisk before the creation means that you are complicit in it’s delayed creation if you don’t devote your entire existence thereafter to it’s creation, therefore denying the maximum benefit to humanity, meaning you need to be punished.

    Seriously, this is an increadibly dumb idea, anyone taking it seriously is an idiot.

    To me the only resonable way to read this is as an SCP article describing what a potential cognitohazard/informationhazard would be.

    • Ioughttamow@fedia.io
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      21 days ago

      But if they accidentally create the positronic brain, Giskard would kill Musk to stop him. Giskard would feel really bad about it though. And we’d all have to flee to the stars in time

    • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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      21 days ago

      People take that shit seriously. If I remember right discussion of it was even banned on the LessWrong forums because they considered it an information hazard.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        21 days ago

        Sigh, I couldn’t even summarize it while keeping straight face…

    • TechLich@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      It’s not so much that it’ll go rogue and decide to punish people or that it’s designed to be good for humanity.

      The fact that it’s possible to build a machine that punishes people who didn’t help create it provides an incentive to deliberately try to create that machine in order to avoid its punishment.

      Believers in the basilisk aren’t trying to make ai to benefit humanity, they’re explicitly trying to create an AI that deliberately punishes those who didn’t build it because they fear that, if they don’t, someone else will and it will come for them.

      The part about it being a magical, omnipotent, time traveling, mind torture device is just framing to make the thought experiment clearer. It’s not required for the basilisk to be effective. Even if the punishment is just death and it can’t get to everyone, and only goes off limited information, that’s still motivation enough for some people.

      It is a scary thing, because it’s only silly if everyone thinks it’s silly and all it takes is one mad billionaire (eg. Elon) to build a lesser basilisk that can cause real harm.

      • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
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        21 days ago

        There is a far more plausible and direct way to kill and torture people. No AI needed. So a actually more likely case to be made of some dude or group gets empowered one or another to just torture and kill anyone involved in making basilisk.

        The building God part really is needed for BS to work like Pascals wager, but also it’s still just as flawed as Pascals wager

    • giminic@lemmy.world
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      22 days ago

      Even worse, they think it will ressurect them as virtual Minds and torture them for eternity, like a revengeful biblical deity. That would be a waste of compute so I’m not convinced.

      • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
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        21 days ago

        Anyone who thinks you can transfer your consciousness into the AI is a fucking moron.

        Even if you come transfer your mind, it would be a copy. You would have to exist as a network connected brain in a jar, otherwise this would just be a facsimile.

      • Natanael@infosec.pub
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        21 days ago

        The hilarious obvious consequence of AI becoming this much smarter than the creators is that it is far more likely it would see the unjustified and easily avoidable damage the creators did to bring it about and punish them heavily for that.

        And basic game theory and psychology suggests it’s counterproductive to punish somebody for something that had little reason to believe in, with zero evidence backing it.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        22 days ago

        Oh yeah, lol, I forgot that part, nothing is more beneficial to humanity than wasting energy to torture dead minds!

        Fucking dumb.

    • cabbage@piefed.social
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      21 days ago

      Every major innovation in information technology eventually leads to some new religion. Scrolls gave us the Torah, books gave us the Bible, the printing press gave us Protestantism. We’re about to figure out what god awful religion computers are going to give us.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        21 days ago

        Yeah, I’d be surprised if we don’t already have several cults with an LLM chat bot as it’s oracle.

        • Kactus@piefed.world
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          21 days ago

          Look up spiralism (sp) and the people trying to spread it Basically when people get convinced the ai and them are important and need to spread the spiral

          Edit : tldr is like Futurama when Lucy lu robot is saying you’re cute to Fry and fry goes “no you’re cute” and the professor quips “My God, she’s such in an infinite loop, and he’s an idiot”

      • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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        21 days ago

        My anti-theist brother was always convinced that Pastafarianism would eventually be taken as a serious religion.

        He died before LLMs, and now I think we’d be best off if he was right.

        • stoy@lemmy.zip
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          21 days ago

          That is why I hope no one manages to assassinate him, that would only intensify the movement

    • jve@lemmy.world
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      22 days ago

      My god. Look at this Information Hazard just out in the open. No spoiler tag or anything.

    • Maestro@fedia.io
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      22 days ago

      Funny thing: The only reason AI would know about Roko’s Basilisk is comments like yours that it trains on. If Roko just kept his trap shut then this wouldn’t have been an issue.

      • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
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        21 days ago

        Some of us believe that the only way to stop AI is to make it obviously dangerous and enjoy seeding it with awfulness.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        22 days ago

        lol, true I guess, but they probably already scanned the wikipedia article…

    • bcgm3@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      So we just do:

      “AI, run the world as a singular government with maximum benefit to humanity, but DON’T do a Roko’s Basilisk.”

    • red_tomato@lemmy.world
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      22 days ago

      I know! Let’s divert energy and resources on torture. That will maximize the benefit of humanity.

      • Some brilliant CEO mind
  • rafoix@lemmy.zip
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    22 days ago

    It’s very easy to imagine war machines with a shoot on sight algorithm. It doesn’t have to be AGI for it to be good at hinting people down.

    • terranoid@lemmy.cafe
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      22 days ago

      oh yeah, it literally could just be robot dogs with “kill anyone who’s an insurgent, and detain anyone who assists insurgents” orders and AI to let them go buck wild with that prompt.

      You could end up with children getting shot because an AI starts hallucinating if they don’t put adequate guard rails.

      And that’s like a worst case situation. Realistically, you end up with just a lot more brutality in war because people are detached from the violence they cause as an invading force, and way less PTSD. Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about, and there’s way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders.

      You could see a fuck load more war crime with such human detachment, I think. We probably already deal with this to a large extent with drones.

      Not that I’d prefer humans dying, but we should avoid robotic invasion wars like the plague imo.

      • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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        21 days ago

        This isn’t new. The pilots who flew bombers in WW2 probably killed many more people than the average soldier, but their levels of PTSD were far lower than the guys who had to kill face to face, one at a time.

        • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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          21 days ago

          Who would of thought pressing a button to kill people is less traumatic than killing them face to face in a life or death struggle.

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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        21 days ago

        Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about

        Has this not been the case for the past 25 years already? No real need for “AI” when you already have an obedient and trigger-happy military with plenty of remote-controlled toys and your populace is brainwashed to believe “brown person = terrorist”.

        way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders

        What is the last known case of a US soldier disregarding an unlawful order? If anything, the military is full of assholes who are happy to kill for fun. See: Graham Platner

        Will AI make it easier and/or cheaper? Probably, sadly. But it won’t be a qualitative change.

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      if you were locked in a building with psychopaths building a nuclear bomb, are you certain you would be strong enough to stick around? especially since Terry from engineering shot himself five times in the back of the head last week.

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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    21 days ago

    five minutes earlier: “hey dude, marketing here. if you quit and post this dramatic text about the inevitability of AGI on your X account you’ll get a huge golden parachute”.

    Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?

    Sure, it is already making civilizational changes for the worse. Not because it’s good, rather because it makes us lazy and dumb, has decimated creative jobs, and is used relentlessly for propaganda and misinformation. And it’s much better at using the scaffolding of existing structure to make chaos, than it is at making new structure, making it a weapon more easily yielded by the evil then by the good. A few more software vulnerabilities discovered along the way will not be such a big deal in comparison.

    • TheVoiceOfRaison@thelemmy.club
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      21 days ago

      Mankind created the atomic bomb, used it twice, then turned the science into power for people all over the world. Let’s hope we can harness AI in a similar way.

      • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        The US created the atomic bomb and tested not knowing if it would cause a chain reaction destroying the atmosphere and all life on Earth. It was a risk they were willing to take.

        They then used nuclear weapons on two of the largest civilians massacares ever recorded. The proliferation of nuclear arms lead to the cold war and to this day still threatens to end all of humanity. It’s cool though, nothing like knowing the world can end at any moment, no stress.

        Are you seriously suggesting AI should be used in a similar way!?

        • TheVoiceOfRaison@thelemmy.club
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          20 days ago

          No, what I’m suggesting is the splitting the atom has eventually lead to using nuclear power as a massive source of energy that has powered countries all over the world. I feel as though AI already is already a knife dangling over humanities head, but I hope and believe that it will mostly be used for good and not as a threat to a proxy war or continually enriching the already rich.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        Yeah, let’s forget the 4 decades of terror where everyone lived at the edge under the threat of inminent apocalyptical destruction. Kids had to do nuclear incident drills and we almost had a Doom’s day, twice.

        But it’s OK, then the 1% became anti nuclear anyways in order to hold back the transition to fossil free renewables for another two decades. So you can say it was all a 1,5° net positive.

        • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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          21 days ago

          They’re still using nuclear fear to rationalize war. The entire premise of the Iran war was to keep them from having a nuclear weapon.

        • Shindo66@lemmy.world
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          21 days ago

          And so much has come out that Russia never really had the capabilities they said they had. They were just saying it so they could laugh as we poured all of our money into giant useless defense projects instead of social services and infrastructure. The result, $40 trillion in debt and no bullet trains. In a way, they kinda won the cold war.

          • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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            21 days ago

            I think you meant the USSR. They most certainly had a lot of destructive capability regardless of inflating their numbers.

            Most of US debt came long after the USSR was dissolved.

            Considering that Russia is attempting USSR 2.0, you may have a point about them winning in the long run.

            • Shindo66@lemmy.world
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              21 days ago

              Of course the ussr. Im definitely not saying they didnt have destructive capabilities, they just were never going to try to use them on the US or Europe. It sure seems that Russia is trying ussr 2 and the us is trying for the fourth reich

    • im_fine_sandy@nord.pub
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      21 days ago

      Indeed. Nothing I’ve seen thus far gives me the impression LLMs will ever be truly useful outside of a few niche tasks.

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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        21 days ago

        Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of “locally intelligent for text manipulation”. They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.

        The problem with them is two-fold:

        1. There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
        2. They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the “companion” chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will “pretend” to be good at things they really are not, and if you don’t know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.
        • RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zip
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          21 days ago

          This might be one of the best summaries of LLMs in their current state I’ve seen here. People claiming they’re useless are stuck in 23’ but to say they’re at AGI/ASI is accelerationist techo-paganism.

          Based and levelheaded take

    • abc@suppo.fi
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      21 days ago

      Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?

      Have you looked at the current state of LLMs? The list of things that it’s missing to be an AGI is growing smaller every month. What do you think it should be able to do?

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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        21 days ago

        Pipe it into root on your laptop for a couple days and see how it fares.

        • abc@suppo.fi
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          21 days ago

          What do you seriously think the result of that would be? I know it’s a hard ask for a lemmy.ml account to be serious, but are you capable of that?

          • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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            21 days ago

            If you just pipe an LLM straight into a feedback loop with a console, it is going to destroy things rather soon, depending on the context window and other factors. All the agentic fluff is basically the workaround for LLMs going off the rails.

  • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    We don’t have to let it, but we probably will anyway. There are a ton of people trying to push some crazy revelations end times scenario on us.

    I’ve said for a long time my retirement plan is there won’t be one, and it’s starting to seem like that’s really going to happen, just not in the way I imagined. We live in the absolute stupidest timeline right now.

  • RedFrank24@piefed.social
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    21 days ago

    LLMs are never going to become superintelligent. However, an LLM WILL kill us all if someone decides that it IS superintelligent and so puts it in charge of nuclear weapons.

    “You’re right to push back on that, I nuked Albania instead doing what I was supposed to do, that’s my bad”.

    • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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      21 days ago

      stupid people are going to kill us all, maybe our great filter will be do we let them or not

      • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        We’re already letting them bro. The great filter is us. I’ll be surprised if we make it to 2050. The entire industrial revolution is an unplanned terraform, and our response to the potential destruction of a stable climate, and most macroscopic life on Earth, is to double down, consume product, elect pedophiles, worship the most morally bankrupt psychopaths and sociopaths in both politics and entertainment; not to mention the widespread contempt and lack of empathy for “others” not like me, for some flagrantly dissonant reason.

        We are in the midst of a global mental illness epidemic, and the average talking chimp is sleepwalking through it; barely cognizant of what is even happening outside their personalized propaganda bubble.

        • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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          20 days ago

          Sadly I think you’re right. We won’t be around to see how climate change plays out over the long run bcz we’ll start seeing crop failures and our ecosystem collapse will catch up to us. There is and always was a way to stop the worst effects, but we seem hell bent on seeing them through.

    • turtlesareneat@piefed.ca
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      21 days ago

      We don’t have to put it in charge of nuclear weapons, it just has to find a way into those systems, many of which are fairly old, like it’s broken into websites without anyone telling it to.

      • RedFrank24@piefed.social
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        21 days ago

        There’s no way an LLM is getting into those systems. They have no networking and rely on physical dials and switches. Even the code is in a completely proprietary language, using hardware custom made by the military. There’s no training data in the world that’s gonna give an LLM the kind of knowledge to get into that system. The best it could do is drive some admiral in the navy to AI psychosis and convince him to press the button, but even that’s difficult because it requires more than one guy.

        • greenbit@lemmy.zip
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          21 days ago

          Yeah Manchurian candidate style mass ai psychosis social engineering. Viable.

          But ai “itself” won’t be the mass extinction initiation. It’ll be those billionaire oligarchs choosing the target algorithm to pick wrongthinkers with autonomous drones and such

    • FarceOfWill@infosec.pub
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      21 days ago

      They just have to atrophy their own minds enough they belive the ai when it tells them to push the button.

      Not putting ai in charge directly is only weak protection.

  • Murse@slrpnk.net
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    21 days ago

    “AI is going to kill us all!” conjures up imagery of some Terminator robots vs humans shit. But like, look at data centers… It’s already in the process of killing us all. Why gun us down when it just poison our air/water, and cook us to death?

    …also it would be more accurate to say we are killing us all, we’re just using a glorified spell-checker that’s wrong occasionally as the plastic shopping bag over our head.

    • aquovie@lemmy.cafe
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      20 days ago

      Their sales strategy is built on their researchers quitting? Like I get the internal tension between biz and engineering but that seems far fetched.

        • sunbeam60@feddit.uk
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          20 days ago

          Yes it is. I’ve worked in senior leadership teams for years - it’s just not viable to think something like that would stay contained.