I always figured that people who genuinely believed their employers were likely to kill literally everybody in the near future might burn down a bit more than that, but so far it's mostly been tweets

Having to poke through an about: page and find the thing to toggle to turn off this specific AI feature but not that one, and knowing they'd change it on you a couple of releases later, never filled me with confidence.

One switch in a readily discoverable location in the settings menu and it's all gone? Just the job, killed it now on the laptop and the mobile both.

Any feminist can tell you that the toxic extreme masculinity being used to brainwash young poor men into dying for their country's rich people is what we're trying to get rid of.

Sex equality is a net positive for people from all genders.

This is why they're so keen on robots. They want guards whose loyalty they can really count on when the mob shows up with a guillotine.

That one might surrender and meekly accept their likely death at the hands of the machine, I can believe. But all of them? This isn't the first such claim we've heard about AI danger.

I believe that Yudkowsky believes what he says he believes, for example. He says shut them all down worldwide, immediately, and if there are rogue nations who don't go along with it then launch air strikes on their data centres - even against a nuclear state. He said that three years ago. That's the thinking of a man who believes it's genuinely likely that the machines will kill us all in the near future.

And this is still considered extremist lunacy. That tells me the rest of them don't believe what he does.

The general public should care because there's apparently a good chance these machines are going to kill them all, very soon.

They don't care because they don't believe that.

When some AI agent of theirs, trying to meet a developer's benchmark test, eventually hacks the power grid or the water supply to a metropolis to help itself to a way around a sandbox environment, then the general public will care. And when that happens they may well drag AI industry CEOs and researchers out of their beds to the nearest lamp-post.

> approximately eight hundred billion ... oops, that's eight hundred million, of course. Ten percent probability, times the current population of the Earth. The expected consequences of allowing the AI industry to continue their work, according to people who are oddly calm about the prospect.

The actual post is behind a login wall, but I don't see from the BBC article that he's even advocating any action. Is he demanding the immediate shutdown of the data centres? Raids on the labs? Coordinated global action to impound and destroy the equipment? Life imprisonment for anybody found training large neural networks? Rogue researchers declared hostis humani generis? There's no mention of it.

That's what I'd be advocating at the very least. Then the question of whether to take direct action personally on top of that would be one of practicality - can I lay my hands on the right equipment, how can I do the most effective damage, do I have access to high value targets, will it be dramatic enough to frighten new recruits away from joining the industry, will others be inspired to follow my example, should I take the time first to form a team for more extensive action, that kind of thing. It wouldn't be a question of whether it should happen, only one of whether those are the right tactics. Yes, in all probability I'd decide I wasn't personally cut out for terrorism or assassination, but not everybody would decide so. It would be a reasonable choice in the circumstances.

If the expected bodycount from the operation of this industry over the next ten years was approximately eight hundred billion, then that would make AI researchers the single most dangerous group of human beings that has ever existed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, previous title holders for the worst people ever, probably didn't kill even a tenth as many as this man says he expects AI firms to kill in roughly the same timescale. That is the comparison that would frame my thinking about AI researchers and what we should do with them, if I believed what he says he believes.

And I just don't see that kind of thing coming up in these conversations. People calmly and academically discuss their probability estimates as if it's a question of pure theory, not the imminent destruction of all humanity. If they really believed what they say, there would certainly by now be AI Luigis everywhere, data centres would be burning, and people would be quitting the industry all over the world for their own safety. That simply isn't happening. So I don't believe they actually do think that this outcome is likely. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions say they don't believe a word of it.

... then I would be demanding that every single person involved in the AI industry be rounded up and shot. All of them. My former boss, my coworkers, our competitors, all of them. I would be advocating a world in which is was worse to be found with LLM weights on your computer than to be caught with the worst possible kind of CSAM.

But apparently the idea that his former employer might literally kill literally everybody in just ten years' time isn't that big a deal for this guy. Go into the office one day and take a Second Amendment approach to as many of the frontier research team as possible? No... let's just whine about it on the internet!

Which is why I'm not at all convinced he believes this. If he believed that, this action is too small a response. Nothing short of Butlerian jihadism is an appropriate response, if you actually believe this.

If you were worried about being chased by kill bots, go and watch some videos from drone operators in Ukraine. Robots don't need feet for that job.

Put in the instructions "Do not sabotage others" and the agent goes on reasoning two pages about what's sabotage and then probably just gives up (as according to the article some did). AI is a soldier, it does what it is told to and doesn't ask why...

... with some degree of probability. It may also happen to receive a pseudorandom number in its noise input that transforms a 'do' into 'don't'; or maybe that command is just not the most likely weight to have any effect on the output so it's simply ignored and quickly falls out of the attention window, forgotten forever.

LLMs combine the worst attributes of the literal genie in the lamp and the absent-minded professor: it simply cannot be trusted to make a decision; they're just too unpredictable specially in the long run.

I see them as one of those 100-entries D&D tables of outcomes that you can get from a dice roll as a result of a random event or encounter. You may try to skew the result with positive modifiers, but on the end you always can roll out a very low number (even a natural '1') and get one of the worst results from the bottom of the table.

What people usually don't get is that LLMs don't reason, they follow scripts.

They have memorised most of the available human interactions available online, so they can behave convincingly in a wide range of situations mimicking proper human behaviour. They may even seem to reason if you put them in a loop and make them reflect on their own answers; this may result in them making proper logical inference, but you may also produce any number of illogical conclusions that happen to be the most likely next step according to the script they are following at that moment (but which may change at any time).

Surfaces of 3D objects are 2D objects, I think it's in the mathematical definition and all.

You don't need a full audit to find out why the software is doing something weird, nor all companies need to do it.

Some companies care about their mission-critical software so they will be monitoring it carefully. If some very popular package is doing malicious things, the chances that it will be caught are quite high. And if the software is FLOSS it's way easier for the company to fix it themselves, release the fix upstream and warn the world about the fishy nature of the provider. So no, I don't believe all computers are owned either by the CIA or other world powers.

This was (and still is) the #1 reason why open source software became the basis for the internet and corporate world. Being free of charge gained home users and small companies, but what made it grow was corporate adoption pouring money into it to make it viable.

People forgetting history makes them repeat all again, I guess.