I'm glad you recognize the confirmation bias, yet I would dispute that it is in any way vindicated.

AI did not order the interception, put the assets in the air, or even submit the report. It got a manifest wrong in a chat session (not clear even it was its own error or related to the input), and that is... actually well-within common human error, not some special AI thing.

In fact intelligence is wrong all the time, and at all scales, but to name a big one, was AI to blame for the confidence of the existence of WMDs that was the basis for the Iraq war? Maybe it would have *averted* that war by helping with better assessment.

The story is sensationalized even without the effort to scaremonger on AI. There was never *any* chance of "causing a war" with China by interdicting a merchant ship in a officially declared maritime blockade zone, or we wouldn't have done it, even for nuclear components. In fact we've *already* intercepted Chinese vessels there and obviously they don't like it but just as obviously they don't feel like paying the cost of war with a major power to blow off their steam about it. (That's frankly a quite insane view of international relations.)

And it's not even clear to me that anything wrong was done. They double checked the intelligence, found it was incorrect, and ultimately took no action. Isn't that... exactly what is supposed to happen? Deploying your interdiction parallel to the intelligence check is a reasonable way to ensure a successful timeline in case something does need to be done. It's easy to recall planes in a false positive, not so easy to teleport them where they need to be for a verified true positive.

Unfortunately popular journalism is far from truth seeking. The dramatic and dangerous sells more copy, so that's what gets written. If you're going to use that as the raw material of your worldview, then of course it will wind up anti-tech and anti-science. At the very least I suggest finding a more reputable source of journalism to feed your biases than this slop.

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "AI will extinctify the human species" is an extraordinary claim, but it's also entirely borrowed from cheesy sci-fi movies, and citing Terminator is apparently this guy's only evidence.

How will AI kill us all, exactly? In addition to the question of, mechanically, how does it obtain the physical capability and resources and organize them to that purpose, I want to know how it does it without any humans noticing or intervening? (not only that it would presumably have to go up against other AGI or near-AGI competitors - the solitary AI made by a random unwitting engineer from the movies is obviously not how the present has played out).

Let's say it is going to build killer robots to off us all. Where does it get the raw materials? How does it setup manufacturing? Make the purchase orders? Do the humans just voluntarily send it massive amounts of ore and build factories in their backyards? Or does it have to mine its own ore and they don't notice the huge stripmines? Does it get the robots right on the first iteration or do they start off as a typical MVP in which case again no one notices? What about the energy bills? How does it navigate the required in-person meeting with the city to sign off on the parking lot tree choices for its downtown killer-robot-factory?

There are so many friction points and assumptions of actual humans interacting with each other to get anything done that "skynet on your laptop" would be about as helpless today as if it had appeared 50 years ago. And unlike the movies it doesn't "just appear."

Could we over the coming years remove a lot of those frictions? Sure. But we could just not, and if we are concerned about them disappearing, then surely we want to see where AI leads *now* and if it has a dangerous temperament rather than *after* we've automated enough for it to manage our resources fully independently?

Being conscious of new threats posed by agentic actors is reasonable and can be grounded in reality. But people who want to feel important have been waving "END OF THE WORLD" signs on streetcorners forever.

I've been using Claude to both understand and assist in writing new code in DB/C, an obscure dialect of another pretty obscure language called PL/B or DATABUS -- all of which are descendants of (or highly influenced by) COBOL. It's pretty fantastic. It's a codebase that is ~50 years old, hundreds of thousands of lines, with code spread throughout modules, with jump tables and gotos everywhere. The code itself is easy to read and understand, but the flow is not!

the use of HIS AI is very negotiable and many countries have already been steering away from "OpenAI" (currently probably one of the most non-open AI countries out there).
The current trend in AI research indicates that smaller and thus much cheaper and less resource-hungry models can be used for most tasks and that trend will continue.
The bad news for Altman is that it currently looks like there is no way for him to ever make OpenAI profitable. It is hard to see what the USP for OpenAI could be that would ever allow it make up for the huge investments and become profitable.

will just vote for those who tell them it is all a big conspiracy and the right thing to do is drill, baby drill and buy even more large cars!

The number of stupid people, especially in a large country, especially in a country with amoung the highest CO2 emissions per capita, is apparently just too high to allow any hope at all.

when people are stupid enough to accept it.
And apparently, a large (big enough) part of people are stupid enough.

I know nothing about this guy or this project. But the author of the summary apparently feels that, in the spirit of deep investigation and journalistic corroboration, the evidence we *really* need to evaluate is an unnamed blogger:

and not the actual quote from the guy apparently supporting the ethnic cleansing of Europe?

Either that quote exists, and is infinitely more significant evidence for us to see and evaluate, or it doesn't exist, and the author is just helping to propagate slander.

Given the author's choice I'll take a guess which.

It has happened under both.

Also, to preempt any pedantic response, yes, I'm aware that Cray computers are still very much a thing. But, using the phrase "Cray computers" as the epitome of computing power is very much a thing of the 1990s and before.

Hah, now see, I left some keywords in my last post you would have picked up on if had done national security work (at least connected to one of the bigger players).

That Wikipedia page is severely out of date. For instance, it quotes Hayden as NSA director talking about "Cray" computers. Hayden hasn't held a position in maybe 20 years, and his last position was as DCIA! US Intel is very, very aware of the computational and hacking abilities of China, North Korea, and others.

> Indeed. The Chinese also know that publishing a story about a found backdoor in their software would be a great exploit for the US and hence they know that the US is looking. Strangely, nothing has been found so far. Or rather very obviously, nothing has been found and the whole thing is nothing but lies.

Or maybe, just maybe, when the Chinese AND the Americans IC agencies find exploits and backdoors in the other's countries, they keep them quiet and monitor, save for later, watch other people exploit, etc.

Maybe, when 3-letter agencies in McClean and elsewhere catch incursions, they monitor them closely, analyze their tactics and techniques, and contain. It's a pretty Byzantine system, but that's modern spycraft.

Whether we like it or not, whether we use Windows or not, Microsoft is going to insist on adding the tax whether the PC comes shipped with Windows or not. This is illegal bundling, Microsoft has essentially ignored prior rulings, and it's pretty much a certainty the courts will be fine with this.

That wouldveventually turn out to massively improve everyone's safety and quality of life so much.