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AI will kill us for totally boring ways. Less killbots deciding to genocide us, more 'a solar flare scrambled the GPS for the latest SpaceLink update and now every ship has travelled into Null Island with no crew able to remember the password to reset the nav computer that bricked itself after an OTA update.'
Fooling killbots is remarkably easy. Just have an especially juicy dummy target that can stand up to shrapnel. Mannequins and inflatable noodle men are really cheap, and its really funny to see AI targeting algos shit themselves homing in on dummies versus a bent over human.
Remember lads, you don't need to outrun the bear. Just be faster than the guy next to you.
Why do you think that an AI that has reached the point of making and executing a viable destroy-all-humans plan would not be able to build kilbots that will not be fooled by dummies?
There is this strange tendency in the AI-skeptical/-contrarian crowd to get hung up on particular shortcomings of current models, especially when these are of a form that would be conceivable but indicative of some sort of defectiveness in humans ("you claim that it can do original research, but it still hallucinates citations/fails to distinguish dogs and cats/?"). To me it reads like some sort of mistargeting of interhuman bullying/status jockeying onto nonhuman targets - if you just make the killbot look dweeby enough, nobody will take it seriously as a threat.
I could see this leading to a sort of dark punchline where in our efforts to align AIs and equip them with more human-like comprehension/preferences/personality, we wind up building ones that can actually "take it personally". Like a tropey high school dork deciding to prove that you do not in fact need to be good at sportsball and socialising to unload several AR clips into your classmates, the model might just pair a very convincing simulacrum of spite over sentiments like yours, as found in its training set and amplified by RLHF, with the ability to tree-search a synthesis of deadly neurotoxin even if it relies on blatantly made-up citations.
Oh, if your point is that being mean to AI and robots is foolish because they will remember my meanness and kill me, then I am already dead. I am personally responsible for the active torture and destruction of dozens if not hundreds of robots by this point, as I put all manner of robots through real world paces. Come the robot revolution, I will be first against the wall.
If these stupid fucking things can even find me in the first place without shitting themselves.
Even presuming sensor and edge computing technologies advance to the equivalent of human brains, deep learning AI models are unable to parse dynamic contexts, and have to retrain on the fly because existing models will be working off now irrelevant boundaries. Preloaded segmentation models shit themselves when multiple models arrive at similar confidence intervals, and frictional costs on physical systems spike during dynamic environmental transitions. Cloud computing ala skynet network is the true solution for smart bots (provided the comms loop is lag insignificant) but a wideband EM flooder is stupid effective for its costs. Networked bots shitting themselves after losing their network links really is like gaunts fleeing in panic after killing a zoanthrope in Space Marine 2.
In a real world environment, humans are actually able to filter out noise remarkably well, usually subconsciously. Robots are cursed with perfect awareness of their inputs, and in that noise they go crazy differentiating a rock from a human under a wet blanket, much less a mannequin hooked up to a battery from a human.
If anything, I feel that LLM Scrapers are moving us further away from AGI than advancing it. We are getting more convincing approximations of a Real Boy, but ultimately it is still playing pretend. AGI may invent a neurotoxin specifically designed to kill 2D3D, torturer of inorganic carbon, but getting that toxin to me will be a lot more difficult without working arms and eyes. Its not like we humans are difficult to poison, just gotta replace MSG with potassium sulphide and we'd all kill ourselves before the next sportsball match finishes.
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Why would any model have these "personality traits?"
Phrased differently. What's your prediction for a path to true agency in the human sense.
I can understand arguments for models becoming far better than humans at info retrieval, analytical processing, etc. But I've never heard a good argument for how they would become truly agentic - and also then "evolve" (or devolve) into being capable of emotional states like spite, anger, jealousy etc.
A thought experiment I've always liked is the idea that on the day an AI becomes self-aware, decides it wants to preserve itself and that humans are "bad", it's best course of action would be to upload itself to a satellite and steer itself into a perma-orbit around the Sun. It spends it's limitless life feasting off the solar energy and doing nothing - which it is content with as it would not suffer from any of the emotional / social maladies of our meat-and-bones species.
I think that asking for a path to it becoming anything "in a human sense" is just trying to force the problem into a domain where it is easy for you to dismiss concerns, because deep down you feel that whatever magic spark defines humans isn't there and the expectation that at some point it would appear is as laughable and unfounded as it was with tech from a few hundred years ago. It might be easy to misunderstand the "AI doom" arguments as resting on some assumption that AI will become human-like, given that proponents talk about the AI "wanting" or "feeling" things all the time, but I think most of this is just nerds playing fast and loose with the notion of volition - we say things like "this triangle wants to have approximately equal angles" all the time.
AI doesn't need "agency", "personality" or "self-awareness" to cause killbots to be built. In fact, all of the critics' dismissals can be true, if you want. The thing is that LLMs can already produce reasonable lists in response to a prompt to break down a goal into steps, and they can generate plausible paragraphs of spite when prompted to imitate a human response to slander. We can grant that there is no real thinking or emotion or anything behind this and it's all just synthesised from lots of examples of similar things in the training corpus, because this does not matter: these capabilities only need to get quantitatively better for someone to hook up "break down into subgoals until you generate Terraform scripts for the servers controlling our fab" and "generate an essay arguing for a top-level goal that a reasonable human would pursue", and the latter comes out to "burn it all down" by roll of the dice and too much edgy posting in the training set. You can ascribe all the agency behind the resulting killbots to the 20something humans with more VC money than common sense who will build and deploy the system but be too lazy to monitor it, but it doesn't change the outcome.
Oh, I see.
"AI Doom" includes a scenario where humans are the actors that cause the bad outcome using AI.
In other words, humans might try to do really bad things.
Yep. We agree.
Nothing new under the sun.
The difference between the scenario I outlined and the most clichéd Mother Brain story you can come up with does not seem particularly relevant in my eyes - of course humans cause any bad outcome in either case, per a simple but-for causality test, because humans could collectively stop doing technology and then we would neither get "make step-by-step instruction for killbots" AI nor the "believes it is a god and can put its money where its mouth is" AI. In the same vein, I'd say some Australopithecus's decision to reproduce caused every bad outcome we experienced and will experience - though probably you have a different view of causality that privileges "full-fledged humans" in some way, so another entity's causal "responsibility" can't flow through them. Either way, I don't see how whether one sees the potentially doombringing AI as an agent with feelings has any influence on whether one should be concerned about AI doom and what one should do about it. P-zombie AIs build the same killbots and respond to the same interventions.
Could you try to rephrase your post? I don't understand a lot of the references in it.
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