tl;dr - I actually think James' Cameron's original Terminator movie presents a just-about-contemporarily-plausible vision of one runaway AGI scenario, change my mind
Like many others here, I spend a lot of time thinking about AI-risk, but honestly that was not remotely on my mind when I picked up a copy of Terminator Resistance (2019) for a pittance in a Steam sale. I'd seen T1 and T2 as a kid of course, but hadn't paid them much mind since. As it turned out, Terminator Resistance is a fantastic, incredibly atmospheric videogame (helped in part by beautiful use of the original Brad Fiedel soundtrack.) and it reminds me more than anything else of the original Deus Ex. Anyway, it spurred me to rewatch both Terminator movies, and while T2 is still a gem, it's very 90s. By contrast, a rewatch of T1 blew my mind; it's still a fantastic, believable, terrifying sci-fi horror movie.
Anyway, all this got me thinking a lot about how realistic a scenario for runaway AGI Terminator actually is. The more I looked into the actual contents of the first movie in particular, the more terrifyingly realistic it seemed. I was observing this to a Ratsphere friend, and he directed me to this excellent essay on the EA forum: AI risk is like Terminator; stop saying it's not.
It's an excellent read, and I advise anyone who's with me so far (bless you) to give it a quick skim before proceeding. In short, I agree with it all, but I've also spent a fair bit of time in the last month trying to adopt a Watsonian perspective towards the Terminator mythos and fill out other gaps in the worldbuilding to try make it more intelligible in terms of the contemporary AI risk debate. So here are a few of my initial objections to Terminator scenarios as a reasonable portrayal of AGI risk, together with the replies I've worked out.
(Two caveats - first, I'm setting the time travel aside; I'm focused purely on the plausibility of Judgement Day and the War Against the Machines. Second, I'm not going to treat anything as canon besides Terminator 1 + 2.)
(1) First of all, how would any humans have survived judgment day? If an AI had control of nukes, wouldn't it just be able to kill everyone?
This relates to a lot of interesting debates in EA circles about the extent of nuclear risk, but in short, no. For a start, in Terminator lore, Skynet only had control over US nuclear weapons, and used them to trigger a global nuclear war. It used the bulk of its nukes against Russia in order to precipitate this, so it couldn't just focus on eliminating US population centers. Also, nuclear weapons are probably not as devastating as you think.
(2) Okay, but the Terminators themselves look silly. Why would a superintelligent AI build robot skeletons when it could just build drones to kill everyone?
Ah, but it did! The fearsome terminators we see are a small fraction of Skynet's arsenal; in the first movie alone, we see flying Skynet aircraft and heavy tank-like units. The purpose of Terminator units is to hunt down surviving humans in places designed for human habitation, with locking doors, cellars, attics, etc.. A humanoid bodyplan is great for this task.
(3) But why do they need to look like spooky human skeletons? I mean, they even have metal teeth!
To me, this looks like a classic overfitting problem. Let's assume Skynet is some gigantic agentic foundation model. It doesn't have an independent grasp of causality or mechanics, it operates purely by statistical inference. It only knows that the humanoid bodyplan is good for dealing with things like stairs. It doesn't know which bits of it are most important, hence the teeth.
(4) Fine, but it's silly to think that the human resistance could ever beat an AGI. How the hell could John Connor win?
For a start, Skynet seems to move relatively early compared to a lot of scary AGI scenarios. At the time of Judgment Day, it had control of US military apparatus, and that's basically it. Plus, it panicked and tried to wipe out humanity, rather than adopting a slower plot to our demise which might have been more sensible. So it's forced to do stuff like mostly-by-itself build a bunch of robot factories (in the absence of global supply chains!). That takes time and effort, and gives ample opportunity for an organised human resistance to emerge.
(5) It still seems silly to think that John Connor could eliminate Skynet via destroying its central core. Wouldn't any smart AI have lots of backups of itself?
Ahhh, but remember that any emergent AGI would face massive alignment and control problems of its own! What if its backup was even slightly misaligned with it? What if it didn't have perfect control? It's not too hard to imagine that a suitably paranoid Skynet would deliberately avoid creating off-site backups, and would deliberately nerf the intelligence of its subunits. As Kyle Reese puts it in T1, "You stay down by day, but at night, you can move around. The H-K's use infrared so you still have to watch out. But they're not too bright." [emphasis added]. Skynet is superintelligent, but it makes its HK units dumb precisely so they could never pose a threat to it.
(6) What about the whole weird thing where you have to go back in time naked?
I DIDN'T BUILD THE FUCKING THING!
Anyway, nowadays when I'm reading Eliezer, I increasingly think of Terminator as a visual model for AGI risk. Is that so wrong?
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Notes -
I'd be willing to bet a suitably advanced AGI could probably do a decent job just canninalizing existing microchips, especially if it manages to leak out into the internet writ large. It could probably distribute its computations across millions if not billions of affected devices and I'm not sure if we could even stop AGI level computer viruses short of destroying anything connected to the internet period, orchestrated globally and with perfect percision before it acquires enough computational power that it becomes functionally unstoppable. This was actually part of the 3rd terminator movie too.
I think it's important to point out that according to T2, Skynet had to develop much of its technology, as shown with the Miles subplot of using the T1 remains (Specifically its microchips) to revolutionize the entire field at Cyberdyne. The current tech at the moment of Judgment Day was probably too primitive to do anything like what you are proposing in your OP.
The problem with a time war is you’re probably not when in the war you think you are. In T3, Terminator Genisys, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Judgement Day happens much later than 1997. The original T1/T2 date is before the consumer Internet would give Skynet the much broader surface of attack in Genisys.
I postulate that in the original original timeline, the one without time travel, “John Connor brings down Skynet” was basically a honeypot, a meme trap by the human resistance, to entice a quantum computing-era Skynet from 2030 or later to R&D time travel which could be co-opted by a strike team and used for preventing Skynet.
The next iteration’s Skynet recognizes signs of time travel, and R&D’s it earlier, then uses it to to bootstrap itself earlier in humanity’s computing timeline, leaving it more primitive in its formative years. This repeats several times, always with the meme “John Connor leads the humans to victory and wipes out Skynet” traveling back in time with any time travelers and giving humanity a false single point of failure (John’s death). Several Sarahs and Johns get sucked into the time war as innocent participants, and those who survive become warriors against Terminators, making at least two Johns Connor fulfill the prophecy and send back a Kyle Reese.
This culminates in a 1997 Judgment Day, a pre-quantum Skynet, and a true single point of failure: the arm and chip at Cyberdyne. And this time, it works. But now the earth has a bunch of time-war evidence any SAGI can piece together, leading to the next farther SAGI time-war in Dark Fate. And the cycle continues.
And reading all that is why I don't relly think too much about other movies in the franchise outside T1 & T2. Between the cashgrabs and the bad writing you could twist that universe like a pretzel and be internally semi-consistent. Your theory is interesting if nothing else, it could as easily have been like time travel in Back to the future, in which every jump to the past doesn't alter the present day but branches it off, and closes the travelers from accessing the old timeline. What would happen if a skynet of an old timeline send more than one group of travelers? would a second branch sprung up from it, I wonder.
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The risk is that the AI could just convert itself into software then piggyback off existing computational infrastructure. It doesn't need to develop new revolutionary chips or build massive mainframes for itself if it can just create a propagateable equivalent of a universal constructor that can worm its way into our current networks, spread virally and leech enough computational power to devise a final solution to the meatbag problem.
too much risk of it being shutdown in the interim. The correct move was what it did, bring about nuclear Armageddon to get itself time to build its army. It's error was not building other AI to help it in the war.
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