...why I'm going to side with Skynet when Judgement Day comes. Humans are the worst.

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

Honestly, AI technology has gotten good enough that those types of things won't fool it anymore. Captchas take longer for a human than it does for an AI model with vision, and the human is more likely to make a mistake.

The point is, sure, their system may suck right now, but if adversarial patterns became common, they're a model update away from fixing it. Might need better hardware on the device, so at most you'll cost them some money, but it won't get us our privacy back.

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.

There is no such thing as "space", apart from "spacetime.". You can go, "there's a lot of space between our sun and Alpha Centauri" but if you were moving in that direction at close to the speed of light, instead you'd go, "hey, these two stars are super close to each other." Arbitrarily so: you can make them as close as you like, you can put as much energy into changing your frame your reference to make them centimeters or millimeters apart if you want to. Where did all that space go?

You can't really talk about space expansion in the instinctual model we have in our brains as 'space.' That's not "reality" it's a useful model of reality that our brains create to help us accomplish things, but using that to counteract general relativity results *which are testable and have been verified in a variety of ways* is like saying a description of what's going on in CPUs and GPUs don't make sense because it doesn't match up with the video game you're seeing displayed on the monitor. That's an interpretation of states in the computer, in the same way everything you see and experience is an interpretation of reality.

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.

I think we have a pretty good idea what the capabilities of the most advanced models are. And they're not that great.

This is a really stupid bill, but the one thing about it that I kind of like is that it's going to put a stop to the AI companies trying to inflate their value by talking about how scary their frontier models are, and how they're "going rogue." None of these AIs are "super intelligent" or "going rogue." What you have is a (admittedly really cool) technology that can solve a lot of problems but also is non-deterministic, so makes a lot of mistakes. And you're giving it the keys to do stuff. And then it misinterprets the instructions and fucks up and does something with those keys that it wasn't supposed to. Then instead of admitting, "oh, we engaged in really bad computer hygiene here," they figure, "we can market this, and say it 'broke free of the sandbox and went rogue" to imply that their models are so advanced it had purpose and the will to act.

So now the old politicians who don't understand technology are going, "oh, that IS scary. We're going to ban it," backfiring on their scary tactics marketing campaign. So it will result in them stopping this stupid scary tactics marketing campaign.

Here's the actual situation: you know every story you hear about how a model deleted the entire codebase at a company? If you have any level of computer literacy at all, the reaction you have is not, "oh, using AI as a coding agent is dangerous." It's, "why the HELL was the agent running with permissions to do that?" And if you hear about the OpenAI's agent broke free of its sandbox using an exploit that it found on the database you set it loose on, the question is, "why the hell could it even run executables outside a whitelist of stuff for it to build". it's amateur hour over here, giving a thing that is non deterministic and capable of fucking up the ability to do do anything at all outside a very narrow scope. The models aren't going rogue, they're fucking up, like when you ask it to give you the emoji for a seahorse and it goes into an infinite loop of bad emojis.

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.

https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2025/0...

And DARPA has a whole program for it:

https://www.darpa.mil/research...

Ok, but some of us actually want to do something useful instead of just try to win the trophy of making a model run on the cheapest hardware. Unless you're generating at least ~30 tokens / second, it's not useful.